Assyrian

Assyrians are an Aramaic-speaking Christian people who have lived on the western shore of Lake Urmia since antiquity, making them one of Iran's oldest communities and its second-largest Christian minority after the Armenians. Their Urmia dialect of Neo-Aramaic became, through a 19th-century American mission press, the standard literary language of Assyrians worldwide, and Urmia's Mart Maryam church is revered as one of the oldest churches in the world. Massacres in 1914-1918 and emigration after 1979 shrank a community of well over 100,000 to perhaps 20,000 to 35,000, most of them now in Tehran. Most belong to the Assyrian Church of the East, with Chaldean Catholic, Presbyterian and Pentecostal minorities, and they hold one reserved seat in parliament shared with the Chaldeans. Every 1 April families mark Kha b-Nisan, the Assyrian New Year, with line dances to drum and shawm.

Assyrians are the Aramaic-speaking Christians of northern Mesopotamia, living around the ruins of ancient Nineveh and in the mountain valleys of Duhok, where their churches and monasteries predate Islam. They speak Sureth, a living descendant of the Aramaic of the Bible, and belong to the Assyrian Church of the East, whose patriarch now resides in Erbil, the Ancient Church of the East in Baghdad, and the Syriac Orthodox and Syriac Catholic churches of the Nineveh Plains. War, the 1933 Simele massacre, sectarian violence after 2003 and the Islamic State's expulsion of every Christian from the Nineveh Plains in 2014 have reduced Iraq's Christians from about 1.5 million to perhaps 150,000 to 300,000, and many families still leave each month. Qaraqosh, the largest Christian town in Iraq, has rebuilt its burned churches and holds Palm Sunday processions of tens of thousands. Every 1 April Assyrians march through Duhok in embroidered costume to celebrate Akitu, their ancient new year.

The Assyrians of Jerusalem are Syriac Christians whose grandparents fled the 1915 genocide in the Tur Abdin highlands of south-east Turkey and rebuilt their lives in a small Syriac quarter of the Old City, next to the Armenian Quarter. Some 600 to 1,000 remain, gathered around the Monastery of St Mark, which they venerate as the house of Mary the mother of Mark and the room of the Last Supper. They still pray in Syriac, the classical form of the Aramaic that Jesus spoke, while speaking Arabic at home and Hebrew at work. Most belong to the Syriac Orthodox Church, with smaller Syriac Catholic and Chaldean congregations, and their numbers have fallen steadily through emigration since 1967.

The Assyrians of Lebanon are a small Neo-Aramaic-speaking community of the Assyrian Church of the East, whose families came in waves: survivors of the 1915-1934 massacres in Hakkari and Urmia, Iraqi Assyrians after the 1933 Simele massacre and again after 2003, and about 1,300 households from the Khabur villages of north-east Syria when the Islamic State overran them in 2015. Their life centres on four churches, above all Mar Gewargis (St George) in Sad el Bouchrieh, built in 1953, and the St George school beside it, where Assyrian children learn Syriac alongside Arabic and French. Many refugee families saw Lebanon only as a waiting room and have moved on to Australia, Canada and Europe, leaving a community of a few thousand. Unlike Lebanon's Syriac Christians, who mostly speak Arabic, many Assyrians still speak Sureth at home.

Syria's Assyrians are East Syriac Christians from the Hakkari mountains who fled to Iraq during the First World War and were resettled on the Khabur river west of Hasakah after the 1933 Simele massacre, founding some 35 villages laid out tribe by tribe. They speak Assyrian Neo-Aramaic and belong to the Assyrian Church of the East, which sets them apart from the Turoyo- and Arabic-speaking Syriac Orthodox of the same region. The valley's pomegranate orchards and vineyards fed a farming community of about 15,000 until February 2015, when the Islamic State overran the villages, took more than 230 hostages and burned their churches. Most families then emigrated to Australia, Canada and Europe, and only a few hundred, mostly elderly, remain on the Khabur, with others in Hasakah, Qamishli and Damascus.

Assyrians in Jordan are Syriac Christians of Iraqi origin who belong to the Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholic and Assyrian Church of the East churches, most of them refugees from Mosul and Nineveh Plains towns such as Qaraqosh and Bartella, which the Islamic State emptied of Christians in 2014, and from Baghdad after 2003. A few older families descend from survivors of the 1915 genocide and from Assyrians who came from Palestine in 1948, and live as Jordanian citizens in Madaba, Zarqa and Ajloun. Many still speak Neo-Aramaic at home, and Syriac Orthodox families gather at St Ephrem's cathedral in Amman, where the liturgy is sung in Classical Syriac. Barred from legal work, the refugees have waited years for resettlement in Australia, Canada or the United States, sustained by parishes such as the Virgin Mary church in Marka, and they now number only 1,500 to 2,000.