Throughout the Christian Era, the Assyrians have faced an immense tragedy through persecution, oppression, and massacres. The Assyrian tragedy in Mesopotamia continued intermittently during the Sassanid Persians (A.D. 226 637), Seljuk Turks invasion of the eleventh century, Mongols invasion in 1258, Tamerlane s destruction that began in 1394, the Saffavid Persians in early sixteenth century and during the rule of the Ottoman Turks since the middle of the sixteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Turks and Kurds committed numerous massacres against the Assyrian Christians in their secluded mountains of northern Mesopotamia and in Tur Abdin region in modern southeastern Turkey. As the Ottoman Empire entered WWI, it declared jihad (holy war) against its Christian subjects. Backed by Kurds, the Turkish army invaded northwestern Persia (Iran) and committed further atrocities against the Assyrian refugees who fled the Ottoman territories and against Assyrians of Persia as well. The jihad transformed into an ethnic genocide against the Assyrians that was perpetrated by the Turkish state and Kurdish warlords...
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After the establishment of Islam as a state religion in the Fertile Crescent by the eighth century, the ferocious attacks by the Timurids, plundering the region as they descended from Central Asia in the fourteenth century, drove many Christian Aramaic speakers who did not convert to Islam into the mountains of the Taurus, Hakkari, and the Zagros for shelter. Others remained in their ancestral villages on the Mosul (Nineveh) Plain only to face heavy pressure to assimilate into Arab culture. The greatest catastrophe to visit the Assyrians in the modern period was the genocide committed against them, as Christians, during the Great War. From the Assyrian renaissance experienced when, miraculously, they became the objects of Western Christian missionary educational and medical efforts, the Assyrians fell into near oblivion. Shunned by the Allies at the treaties that ended WWI and after, Assyrians drifted into Diaspora, destructive denominationalism, and fierce assimilation tendencies as exercised by chauvinistic Arab, Persian and Turkish state entities. Today they face the growing clout of their old enemies and neighbors, the Kurds, another Muslim ethnic group that threatens to control power, demand assimilation, and offer to engulf Assyrians as the price for continuing to live in the ancient Assyrian homeland. As half of the world s last Aramaic-speaking population has arrived in unwanted Diaspora, some voices are making an impact, including that of Frederick Aprim. --Eden Naby, PhD, Afghanistan: Mullah, Marx and Mujahid (Westview, 2002)
About the Author
Fred Aprim was born in the city of Kirkuk (the ancient Assyrian city of Arrapha), northern Iraq (Assyria). He is a graduate of Mosul University with a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering. Fred's family, like many Assyrian families, experienced its own share of oppression and persecution. While in Iraq, both his father and teenage brother were imprisoned unfairly and tortured. In 2003, he published a booklet titled "Indigenous People in Distress." In December 2004, he published his second book "Assyrians: The Continuous Saga". His third book on Assyrian genocide and the Assyrian national question "Assyrians: From Bedr Khan to Saddam Hussein" (First Edition) was published in July 2006.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
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This review is from: Assyrians: From Bedr Khan to Saddam Hussein (Paperback)
This book is the story of the Assyrian Christians and the destruction of their communities that began in the late 19th century and have not ceased to this day. In Iraq after 2003 more than 40 churches have been bombed and Assyrians are murdered and kidnapped daily. This book is a wonderful testament to this ancient community of Christians who have existed in along the Tigris and Euphrates since the birth of Christ. The book is full of wonderful, never before published, photographs.
The story is a chronological history of the Assyrians from the Ottoman massacres of 1895 to the reign of Saddam Hussein. It is primarily a story of misery. The Assyrians were often promised their own state and help from Russia, the British and others but time and again the international community and foreigners have betrayed them or looked the other way as they were destroyed. In Turkey the persecution and destruction of the Assyrians went side by side with the destruction of the Armenians and later the oppression of the Kurds. By the end of the First world war the once sizable Assyrian community in Turkey had been destroyed. Many refugees fled over the mountains to Syria and Iraq. In Iraq in the 1920s they were trained the British into the famed Assyrian Levies, army units. They then became accused of `collaboration' with the British and in 1933 a general genocide of them was committed. The survivors clung on in the mountains of what is now Kurdistan. The coming to power of the Baath did not help them. Any Assyrian leaders who dared to voice support for some autonomy or pride in their nation were murdered or assassinated. Later the Anfal campaign in the North and the Arabization plans of Saddam led to the destruction of more Assyrian villages. Assyrian refugees fled once again to Jordan, Turkey and Syria. However in Turkey the slow destruction of Assyrians continued as their low birth rates and the imposition of Kurdish migrants made their communities extinct or simply led to their overall demographic disappearance. This is one of the few books on this subject and the historical photographs make it a must own. Hundreds of photos show families and ruined villages. Anyone interested in the Middle East should learn this story, for it is the real story of the Middle East, not the story of the Sunni Arab elites usually presented in the western classroom. Seth J. Frantzman
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