Study On The Issue Of Iraqi Assyrians

The Assyrians is an ancient ethnic group in the Middle East,originating in northern Mesopotamia.Traditionally regarded as the offspring of the empire,due to its religious,linguistic and cultural heritage with the modern Iraqi Assyrians.The modern Assyrians regard the Christian faith as the most common identifiable bond.They mainly include four kinds of religious groups,such as Nestorian,Chaldean,Syrian Orthodox and Syrian Catholics.The Assyrians in the Middle East are now cross-border ethnic groups.It is distributed in northern Iraq,southeastern Turkey,northeastern Syria and northwestern Iran.Among them,the main part is concentrated in big cities such as Baghdad and Mosul,as well as in the mountains of northern Iraq.The others live in the form of traditional communities and villages.In addition,a large number of Assyrians are scattered around the world.During the First World War,the Assyrians joined the Allied countries and cooperated with Britain,Russia and other countries to oppose the rule of the Turks and were ethnically cleansed by the Ottoman Turkish military dictatorship.After the war,the Iraqi Assyrians attempted to build an independent state by the power of Britain.For the sake of profit,the latter placed the majority of the Assyrian Mosul area in the modern Iraqi territory and recruited the Assyrian militia as its military agent.This action led to the subsequent Assyrians being regarded by the Iraqi central government as the “accomplice” of the British colonial rule,which led to the genocide and military cleansing of Assyrian Christians by Iraqi Arab nationalists in 1933.The Iraqi Assyrian problem has arisen.In 1979,Saddam Hussein took power and began to implement an austerity national policy,not recognizing the national status of the Assyrians and asking the latter to register as “Arabs” or “Kurds” in order to assimilate and eliminate the existence of Assyrians.The legitimacy,combined with the Kurdish insurgency and invasion,has continually squeezed the living space of the Assyrians,sharpening the contradiction between the Assyrians and the central government and the Kurds.Entering the 21 st century,as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State(IS)ravaged in northern Iraq,the Assyrians frequently experienced severe national survival crises such as threats of intimidation,kidnapping for extortion,violent evictions,forced conversions,and violent massacres.The Assyrians after the war in Iraq were faced with the challenge of the legitimacy of the national body,political participation and integration into the process of building the nation-state of Iraq.The Iraqi Assyrian issue is a historical epitome of the multi-cultural exchanges in the Middle East and a common manifestation of the minority issues in the modern Middle East.The Assyrian national movement and international political activities have emerged one after another,and have increasingly become one of the focuses of international humanitarian organizations.It is also one of the important issues to be resolved in the construction of modern Iraqi countries.