Story

Director's Notes

The situation Assyrians are facing right now in Iraq is quite dire. I wish I was not compelled to make the film you are curious to see. But the current circumstances in Iraq left me little choice.

My aim in making this film has been to create awareness about what is happening to this ancient population of Christian Assyrians. This is an important story to tell because it is a story of persecution that has gone largely unreported by the mainstream media. And while the focus of the film is on post-Saddam Iraq, I would like to stress that what is happening to Assyrians now is actually a continuation of what has been happening to them for generations. The difference now is that their very survival as a unique people and culture is genuinely at risk.

Many people are not aware of the fact that unlike many ancient cultures, modern descendants of the ancient Assyrians survive. I am one of them. Despite the fall of the Assyrian Empire, we have lived in continuity for thousands of years in the lands of ancient Assyria in northern Mesopotamia. We were among the first converts to Christianity in the first century of the modern era and in turn helped spread, at the time, our new founded religion from the Middle-East eastward throughout Asia.

Our Christianity has been essential to our survival. It has been the social glue that has fed our culture and kept it together amidst waves of invading forces. At the same time, much like the rest of the history of Europe, our community politics often played itself out in religious contexts. And so Assyrians today adhere to several religious dominations. Almost half of the Assyrian population belong to the Chaldean Catholic Church but many also belong to the Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Syriac Catholic Church, and the Maronite Church. Because our Christian identities were so crucial to our survival, these religious identities have taken on cultural connotations, and many Assyrians will use these religious monikers as ethnic ones. But to be clear, all of these Christian groups are ethnically Assyrian, and our use of that term in this film is meant in the global sense.

While Assyrians do live in Iran, Turkey, and Syria, the overwhelming majority of Assyrians surviving today trace their ancestry to the lands of modern northern Iraq, where the ancient Assyrian Empire was based. With the exception of a small Armenian community in Iraq, Assyrians make up almost all of the Christians in Iraq.

Assyrians have openly and peacefully welcomed various ethnic groups such as Arabs, Turks, Persians and Kurds to live among them. Living in peace with their neighbors has been a natural extension of their Christianity. Despite this, they have found themselves persecuted by these groups throughout their history, not out of provocation, but precisely as a result of their Christian identity.

For the past 2000 years, Assyrians have been victims of circumstance. This persecution continued throughout the last century since the creation of the Republic of Iraq, and this more recent persecution is precisely why I and several hundred thousand other Assyrians now embrace America as home.

But what we hope to convey to you through this film is that since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the persecution we face today is different. It's different because now it is existential. Due to the persecution, over 600,000 of our 1.2 million pre-war population, over half of our population, has fled from Iraq, mostly to neighboring countries as refugees. For the first time in history, there are now more Assyrians living in disapora than in their ancestral homeland. Simply stated, if we do not survive in Iraq, we are at the brink of cultural extinction as assimilation into new cultures is inevitable.

For Assyrians, this is not a battle of Eastern Values versus Western Values, Monarchy versus Democracy or Christianity versus Islam. For Assyrians, it is and has simply been about our survival.

This is the circumstance of the Assyrian people in Iraq. And in this context, we, as Assyrians who are proud to be citizens of the world, present our case when the United Nations, and specifically the United States who now play an unmistakably unique role in the politics of Iraq. These various countries we call home are not without responsibility to see that Iraq and all of its people endure.

We are asking these countries we live in to do the right thing: promote freedom, democracy, human rights, and religious liberty. If the United States and other countries fail to assist Assyrians in securing their human rights and assuring their survival in their ancient homeland, I fear that Assyrians will disappear from the world. With your help, we can and will defy this deletion.