Assyrians in Iraq - Independent Kingdom of Iraq

Independent Kingdom of Iraq

In 1933, the Iraqi government held the Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, the Mar Shamun, under house arrest. When he left Iraq to appeal to the British with regard to how the Assyrians were being mistreated in Iraq contrary to the agreement at Iraq's independence to refrain from discrimination against minorities, he was stripped of his citizenship and refused reentry.

During July 1933, about 800 armed Assyrians headed for the Syrian border, where they were turned back. While King Faisal had briefly left the country for medical reasons, the Minister of Interior, Hikmat Sulayman, adopted a policy aimed at a final solution of the "Assyrian problem". This policy was implemented by a Kurd, General Bakr Sidqi. After engaging in several clashes with the Assyrians, on 11 August 1933, Sidqi permitted his men to kill about 3,000 unarmed Assyrian villagers, including women, children and the elderly, at the Assyrian villages of Sumail (Simele) district, and later at Suryia. Having scapegoated the Assyrians as dangerous national traitors, this massacre of unarmed civilians became a symbol of national pride, and enhanced Sidqi's prestige. The British, though represented by a powerful military presence as provided by the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930, failed to intervene, and indeed helped white-wash the event at the League of Nations.

The Assyrian repression marked the entrance of the military into Iraqi politics, a pattern that has periodically re-emerged since 1958, and offered an excuse for enlarging conscription. The hugely popular Assyrian massacre, an indication of the latent anti-Christian atmosphere, also set the stage for the increased prominence of Bakr Sidqi. In October 1936, Bakr Sidqi staged the first military coup in the modern Arab world.

Assyrians continued to serve the British in Iraq (who maintained a military presence until the mid-1950s), despite earlier betrayals. Assyrian levies played an important role in putting down the pro Nazi Iraqi movement in WW2, and served the British in the Mediterranean and North African campaigns during the war.

The World Directory of Minorities states that there are over 300,000 Assyrian followers of the Chaldean Catholic rite in Iraq and that they live mainly in Baghdad. Until the 1950s, Chaldean Catholics were mostly settled in Mosul — in 1932, 70 percent of Assyrian Christians of all denominations lived there, but by 1957, only 47 percent remained, as they migrated southward due in part to ethnic and religious violence and regional and political tensions. It was estimated that about half of Iraq's Assyrian Christian's lived in Baghdad by 1979, accounting for 14 percent of that city's population

This period also marks the intensification of denominational antagonism among Aramaic speakers in Iraq as some church institutions began to distance themselves from the members of the Assyrian Church of the East who were seen as magnets for Muslim antagonism. It is from this period that, as the new Mosul-born patriarch of the Assyrian Apostolic Church of Antioch and All the East (Jacobite) reached the pinnacle of this church's hierarchy, he began to move the Church away from the term Assyrian and toward the term "Syriac." Although the terms "Syrian" and "Syriac" are derivatives of the original term "Assyrian" historically. At the same time, this Church moved its See to Damascus, Syria.