Assyrian Homeland

Assyrian homeland refers to a geographic and cultural region inhabited traditionally by the Assyrian people; who call it Assyria (Syriac: ܐܬܘܪ). It is largely coterminous with the Kurdish homeland, including parts of what is now northeast Syria, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran and southeastern Turkey.

The area of Iraq with the greatest concentration of Assurians is located in the Ninawa-Mosul region in Northern Iraq where the biblical Assyrian capital of Nineveh was located. This area is known as the "Assyrian Triangle."

The Assyrian homeland mirrors the boundaries of ancient Assyria proper, and the later Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, Roman and Sassanid provinces of Assyria (Athura/Assuristan) that retained a significant indigenous, Mesopotamian Aramaic speaking Christian population following the Islamic conquest of Iraq in the late 7th Century AD. Upper Mesopotamia having had an established structure of dioceses by AD 500 following the introduction of Christianity from the 1st to 3rd centuries AD. After the fall of the Neo Assyrian Empire in 608 BC Assyria remained an entity for over 1200 years under Babylonian, Achamaenid Persian, Seleucid Greek, Parthian, Roman and Sassanid Persian rule. It was only after the Arab-Islamic conquest of the second half of the 7th Century AD that Assyria as a named region was dissolved.

Today, Assyrians (also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs) are believed to form a slight majority in two Ninewa counties, Tel Kaif and Al-Hamdaniya. Since the fall of the Iraqi Baath Party in 2003, and in the face of violence against the indigenous Assyrian Christian community, there has been a growing movement for Assyrian independence.