ICC Note: Most Iraqi Christians are ethnically Assyrians, the indigenous people of the country. According to a 1987 census, there were 1.4 million Christians in Iraq. Today, fewer than 400,000 remain. “Within the last twelve years over 65 churches had been bombed and many destroyed, hundreds of Christians were killed, the worst of all have been the kidnappings targeting children and teenagers. Therefore, the new Iraq from the time of its liberation has been a nightmare and has witnessed a huge exodus of Christians,” Hermiz Shahen writes for the Christian Democratic Party in Australia. The article looks at the historical roots of Assyrians, examines the reasons for rising persecution in Iraq and Syria, and calls on Christians in the West to “respond to the needs of our brothers and sisters who live in fear for their lives and communities at this moment.”
By Hermiz Shahen
3/6/2013 Iraq (CDP) – Most Christians in Iraq are ethnically Assyrian. Assyrians are the indigenous people of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Syria and Lebanon, who have a history that spans over 7000 years. Today’s Assyrians are the descendants of the ancient Assyrian Empire that was one of the earliest civilizations to emerge in Mesopotamia. The Gospel was preached to the Assyrians by the Apostle Thomas himself, shortly after the Resurrection of Christ. The majority of the Assyrian population had converted to Christianity by the second century, giving the Assyrians a legitimate claim to being the first Christian nation in history.
Fired by their new faith, the Assyrians began one of the most successful missionary enterprises of all time. By the end of the twelfth century the Assyrian Church spanned the Asian continent, from Syria to the Philippines. Marco Polo reported that during his visit to China in the thirteenth century, he was astonished to find Assyrian priests in the Chinese royal court, and tens of thousands of Chinese Christians. The Assyrian missionaries had been there since the sixth century, and had made such an impact that the first Mongolian system of writing used the Assyrian alphabet.
Over the next centuries, however, Muslim rule and its attendant repression eventually reduced the Assyrians in number and sapped the vigor of their culture. By the mid-1800s wholesale slaughter of Assyrians was being reported at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, under whose control their homeland had fallen. Between 1914 and 1918, two-thirds of all living Assyrians were murdered in a genocide the world has chosen to ignore.
Today, on its ancestral soil, all that is left of the world’s oldest Christian nation is a desperate minority of less than one million people.
Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant. He led his people into senseless wars that resulted in hundreds of thousands of them killed. But, Saddam and his regime did have at least one redeeming characteristic — the genie of Islamic militancy was ruthlessly bottled up. Now that the U.S. and Britain have seized control of Iraq, the cork has been popped.
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