Assyrian people: Encyclopedia II - Assyrian people - Assyrian Diaspora

Assyrian people - Assyrian Diaspora

At the turn of the century the Christian population in Ottoman regions had numbered about 5,000,000. When the massacres finally ended in 1923, about 20,000 Greeks, 10,000 Armenians and 30,000 Assyrians remained. The Assyrian diaspora includes a community in Chicago numbering as many as 80,000, more than in any other American city. Since World War I, the Assyrian diaspora has steadily increased so that there are now more Assyrians living in western countries (including Australia) than in the Middle East. Södertälje in Sweden is often seen as the unofficial Assyrian capital of Europe due to the city's high percentage of Assyrians and the Swedish professional football (soccer) team Assyriska, which played in the the top Swedish football league (Allsvenskan) in 2005, is often viewed as a substitute national team by the diaspora and has fans worldwide. The international Suryoyo TV which broadcast in the Assyrian/Syriac language is also based here.

In 1918, Britain resettled 20,000 Assyrians in Iraqi refugee camps in Baquba and Mandan after Turkey violently quelled a British-inspired Assyrian rebellion. From there, due to their higher level of education, many gravitated toward Kirkuk and Habbaniya, where they were indispensable in the administration of the oil and military projects. As a result, approximately three-fourths of the Assyrians who had sided with the British during World War I found themselves living in Kurdish areas of Iraq. Thousands of Assyrian men had seen service in the Iraqi Levies, a force under British officers separate from the regular Iraqi army. Pro-British, they had been apprehensive of Iraqi independence. Most of those thus resettled by the British have gone into exile, although by the end of the 20th century, almost all of those who remain were born in Iraq. Assyrians living in northern Iraq today are those whose ancestry lies in the north originally. Many of these, however, in places like Berwari, have been displaced by Kurds since World War I. This process has continued throughout the 20th century: as Kurds have expanded in population, Assyrians have come under attack as in 1933, and as a result have fled from Iraq. (Stafford, Tragedy of the Assyrians, 1935)

Unlike the Kurds, the Assyrians scarcely expected a nation-state of their own after World War I, but they did demand restitution from Turkey for the material and population losses they had suffered, especially in northwest Iran, a neutral party in WWI invaded by Turkish forces. Their pressure for some temporal authority in the north of Iraq under the Assyrian patriarch, the Mar Eshai Shimun XXIII, was flatly refused by British and Iraqis alike. In Iran, the once thriving Assyrian community of around 200,000 is diminished at the close of the 20th century to a mere 5,000 while the total population of Assyrians in all of Iran hovers at around 15,000 to 20,000 (total population of Iran is estimated at 68,017,860.)

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Assyrian Diaspora", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki