Assyrians

Assyrian Christians have endured persecution, subjugation and mass killings for nearly two thousand years. Their suffering in Mesopotamia came in waves: under the Sasanian Persian dynasty (A.D. 226 to 637), during the Seljuk Turkish incursions of the eleventh century, after the Mongol invasion of 1258, through the devastation wrought by Tamerlane from 1394, under the Safavid Persians in the early sixteenth century, and throughout Ottoman rule from the mid-sixteenth century onward. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Turkish and Kurdish forces carried out repeated massacres of Assyrian Christians in the isolated mountains of northern Mesopotamia and in the Tur Abdin region of what is now southeastern Turkey.

When the Ottoman Empire joined the First World War, it proclaimed a jihad, or holy war, against its Christian subjects. With Kurdish support, Turkish troops pushed into northwestern Persia (Iran), where they carried out further atrocities against Assyrian refugees who had fled Ottoman lands and against Assyrians already living in Persia. What began as a religious campaign became an ethnic genocide carried out by the Turkish state and Kurdish warlords. During the war alone, the Assyrians lost two-thirds of their population and most of their homeland in northern Mesopotamia.

The author argues that the violence did not end with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. After the modern Middle Eastern states were drawn out of its partition, Assyrians faced systematic policies of Arabization, Turkification and Kurdification imposed by Pan-Arab and Pan-Turkish governments and by Kurdish political parties. Hundreds of thousands fled to Europe, the United States and Australia. The book also addresses the rise of fundamentalism in the Middle East, which it presents as a continuing threat to the surviving Assyrian population and to other Christian communities in the region.