Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors.
Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker.

Responsive image


Assyrian diaspora

An Assyrian folk dance at an Assyrian party in Chicago

The Assyrian diaspora (Syriac: ܓܠܘܬܐ, Galuta, "exile") refers to ethnic Assyrians living in communities outside their ancestral homeland. The Eastern Aramaic-speaking Assyrians claim descent from the ancient Assyrians and are one of the few ancient Semitic ethnicities in the Near East who resisted Arabization, Turkification, Persianization and Islamization during and after the Muslim conquest of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey.

The indigenous Assyrian homeland is within the borders of northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and northeastern Syria, a region roughly corresponding with Assyria from the 25th century BC to the 7th century AD.[1] Assyrians are predominantly Christians; most are members of the Assyrian Church of the East, the Ancient Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Syriac Catholic Church, the Assyrian Pentecostal Church and the Assyrian Evangelical Church.[2] The terms "Syriac", "Chaldean" and "Chaldo-Assyrian" can be used to describe ethnic Assyrians by their religious affiliation, and indeed the terms "Syriac" and "Syrian" are much later derivatives of the original "Assyrian", and historically, geographically and ethnically originally meant Assyrian (see Name of Syria).

Before the Assyrian genocide, the Assyrian people were largely unmoved from their native lands which they had occupied for about 5,000 years. Although a handful of Assyrians had migrated to the United Kingdom during the Victorian era, the Assyrian diaspora began in earnest during World War I (1914–1918) as the Ottoman Empire conducted both large scale genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Assyrian people with the aid of local Kurdish, Iranian and Arab tribes. This genocide was coordinated alongside the Armenian genocide, Greek genocide and Great Famine of Mount Lebanon.

Further atrocities such as the Simele massacres of the 1930s also stimulated emigration.

Additional emigration occurred in the 1980s, as Assyrian communities fled the violence of the Kurdish–Turkish conflict and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. During the 1990s and 2000s, Assyrians left the Middle East to evade persecution in Ba'athist Iraq and from Muslim fundamentalists. The exodus continued into the mid-2010s, as Assyrians fled Iraq and northeastern Syria due to genocide by the Islamic State and other Sunni Islamist groups.[3]

  1. ^ "The Chaldean Assyrian Syriac People of Iraq: An Ethnic Identity Problem – Shak Hanish". The American Foundation for Syriac Studies. Archived from the original on 2020-09-01. Retrieved 2015-02-11.
  2. ^ Minahan, James (2002). Encyclopedia of the Stateless Nations: A-C. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 206. ISBN 9780313321092. The Assyrians, although closely assiociated with their Christian religion, are divided among a number of Christian sects. The largest denominations are the Chaldean Catholic Church with about 45% of the Assyrian population, the Syriac Orthodox with 26%, the Assyrian Church of the East with 19%, the free Orthodox Church of Antioch or Syriac Catholic Church with 4%, and various Protestant sects with a combined 6%.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Codeswitching Worldwide II was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

Previous Page Next Page






شتات آشوري/سرياني/كلداني Arabic Diáspora aramea Spanish Diaspora Asiria–Kasdim–Suryani ID Diaspora assira Italian Assyrische diaspora Dutch

Responsive image

Responsive image