Assyrian people

Assyrians are an indigenous ethnic group native to Mesopotamia, a geographical region in West Asia. Modern Assyrians descend from Ancient Mesopotamians such as ancient Assyrians and Babylonians, originating from the ancient indigenous Mesopotamians of Akkad and Sumer, who first developed the civilisation in northern Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq and Syria) that would become Assyria in 2600 BCE. Modern Assyrians may culturally self-identify as Syriacs, Chaldeans, or Arameans for religious, geographic, and tribal identification.

Assyrians speak Akkadian-influenced Aramaic (Suret, Turoyo), one of the oldest continuously spoken and written languages and one of the oldest alphabetically written languages in the world. Aramaic has influenced Hebrew, Arabic, and some parts of Mongolian and Uighur. Aramaic was the lingua franca of West Asia and the language Jesus spoke.

Assyrians are almost exclusively Christian, with most adhering to the East and West Syriac liturgical rites of Christianity. The churches that constitute the East Syriac rite include the Chaldean Catholic Church, Assyrian Church of the East, and the Ancient Church of the East, whereas the churches of the West Syriac rite are the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Syriac Catholic Church. Both rites use Classical Syriac as their liturgical language.

The ancestral indigenous lands that form the Assyrian homeland are those of ancient Mesopotamia and the Zab rivers, a region currently divided between modern-day Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and northeastern Syria. A majority of modern Assyrians have migrated to other regions of the world, including North America, the Levant, Australia, Europe, Russia and the Caucasus. Emigration was triggered by genocidal events such as the massacres in Hakkari, the massacres of Diyarbekır, the Assyrian genocide (concurrent with the Armenian and Greek genocides) during World War I by the Ottoman Empire and allied Kurdish tribes, the Simele massacre, the Iranian Revolution, Arab Nationalist Ba'athist policies in Iraq (between the years 1968–2003) and in Syria with the takeover by Islamic State of many parts in Syria and Iraq, particularly the Nineveh Plains between 2014–2017. Events such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq by United States and its allies, and the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, have displaced much of the remaining Assyrian community from their homeland as a result of ethnic and religious persecution at the hands of Islamic extremists. Of the one million or more Iraqis reported by the United Nations to have fled Iraq since the occupation, nearly 40% were indigenous Assyrians, even though Assyrians accounted for only around 3% of the pre-war Iraqi demography.

The emergence of the Islamic State and the occupation of a significant portion of the Assyrian homeland resulted in another major wave of Assyrian displacement. The Islamic State was driven out from the Assyrian villages in the Khabour River Valley and the areas surrounding the city of Al-Hasakah in Syria by 2015, and from the Nineveh Plains in Iraq by 2017. In 2014, the Nineveh Plain Protection Units was formed and many Assyrians joined the force to defend themselves. The organization later became part of Iraqi Armed forces and played a key role in liberating areas previously held by the Islamic State during the War in Iraq. In northern Syria, Assyrian groups have been taking part both politically and militarily in the Kurdish-dominated but multiethnic Syrian Democratic Forces (see Khabour Guards and Sutoro) and Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.