ICC Note: Assyrian Christian Human Rights organizations have penned an open letter to the five remaining U.S. presidential candidates. The letter urges all of the potential U.S. presidents to consider the past suffering of Christians in the Ottoman Empire and how history is seemingly repeating itself in the current genocide sweeping the Middle East. The same terrorism that has struck Paris and Brussels threatens the existence of the remaining Christians in countries like Iraq and Syria. 

04/14/2016 Washington D.C. (Christian Post) – Leading Assyrian Christian organizations have collectively penned an open letter to the five remaining U.S. presidential candidates, urging them to fight against radical terror groups and to recognize the past genocide that Christians have suffered under the Ottoman Empire.

The letter, addressed to Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump, states that Assyrian Christians are being “tortured, kidnapped, raped and murdered by radical terrorist organizations such as ISIS.” Assyrians – also known as Chaldeans, Syriacs, and Arameans – are an ethnic group indigenous to the MIddle East who trace their ancestral homeland to today’s northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran and northeastern Syria. Assyrian people are almost entirely Christians.

“We have seen this terror in Paris, Brussels, and other cities around the world, committed in the name of Islam by radical Islamic organizations. For Assyrians it feels like 1915 all over again,” the groups write, referencing the ethnic and religious cleansing carried out by the Ottoman Empire, present-day Turkey, between 1915-1924, when 750,000 Assyrians, 500,000 Greeks and 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives.

“One hundred years have passed since the era of World War I when no one heard the cries of our ancestors, the Assyrian people, in their suffering in that genocide that is known as the Armenian Genocide,” the letter reads.

“26 countries have recognized the Armenian Genocide. 12 countries, governments and institutions have recognized the Assyrian genocide. Turkey, however, continues to deny the genocide,” the Assyrian organizations pointed out.

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