baklawa
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Iraq Connection: Assyrian priest to Modesto Assyrians - "Keep your nationality. Keep your language."
Some questions you ask and you know you?re going to make somebody cry. You see it coming, and you can usually protect yourself from those ones, even if the source can?t.
Other times you ask what you think is a light question and the answer startles you.
In December, I had that experience when I asked a man whose nephew had been killed in a hard-to-explain shootout with Iraqi special forces if I could take his picture. He combed his hair, walked to his car and brought out a poster-size portrait of his nephew and the younger man?s toddler son. He stood by a black banner hand painted to announce his nephew?s death.
Something about seeing him take those steps grabbed me in a way that the hours I spent interviewing him didn?t. I paused, and my partner Sahar Issa asked me if I was ok. I took the picture and didn?t forget his face.
On this Iraq assignment, the answers I remember most came from a simple question I asked in the few days I spent reporting on a migration of Assyrian refugees from Baghdad and Mosul to Northern Iraq?s Kurdish controlled provinces. Most Assyrians have left Baghdad because they were caught between sectarian killings earlier in the war.
I wanted to meet them because I?ve been writing a story every other month or so in Modesto about the hundreds of Iraqi Assyrian refugees who have been moving to the San Joaquin Valley, escaping the war. In fact, I set up these interviews through Suzie Younan (note: this is Ashoor's cousin), a woman who works at the Stanislaus Economic Development Alliance and is positively one of the proudest Assyrian?s I?ve ever met.
At some point in the dozen or so interviews I did in a Christian city outside of the Kurdish capital of Irbil I?d ask, ?I live in California city with many Iraqi Assyrians. What do you want to say to them??
?Come back,? pleaded 20-year-old John Khora, who volunteered his time this summer to build up an Assyrian political bloc gunning for seats in the Kurdish parliament. ?Please come back.?
?Come back, even though there are problems,? said Father Isha Najiba, an Eastern Assyrian priest in Ainkawa. ?Come back and we can live like before.?
Maybe it was the way they said it. Maybe it was knowing that the odds are against anyone who has fled either Saddam Husseim?s regime or the chaos of the past six years ever returning to Iraq for more than a temporary job or a family visit.
Their appeals stayed with me and helped me get a better understanding about what it means for Assyrians, the oldest nationality in Iraq, to lose their homeland. I felt newly embarrassed for all the times I heard the Assyrian language as Arabic and identified it incorrectly in Bee stories. I didn?t know.
Assyrians began moving to Stanislaus County about a hundred years ago when a group from Iran started settling outside Turlock. Since then, Assyrians have arrived in waves, fleeing persecution in Iran, then Iraq, then Iran, then Iraq again. If you check the numbers of refugees moving to Stanislaus County you can see that both of those countries are losing their Assyrians to the San Joaquin Valley now.
Iraq might have a quarter million Assyrians left, down from between 800,000 and 1.5 million before the war. It might have more. No one knows for sure. The people I met in Ainkawa said most of their friends from their old neighborhoods in Baghdad and Mosul are living in Syria and Jordan.
Having such few numbers means they probably won?t get their land back. In that case, Najiba, asked Assyrians living abroad to remember their roots.
?Keep your language. Keep your nationality. Don?t forget it,? he said.
http://thehive.modbee.com/node/15167#comment-99039
Some questions you ask and you know you?re going to make somebody cry. You see it coming, and you can usually protect yourself from those ones, even if the source can?t.
Other times you ask what you think is a light question and the answer startles you.
In December, I had that experience when I asked a man whose nephew had been killed in a hard-to-explain shootout with Iraqi special forces if I could take his picture. He combed his hair, walked to his car and brought out a poster-size portrait of his nephew and the younger man?s toddler son. He stood by a black banner hand painted to announce his nephew?s death.
Something about seeing him take those steps grabbed me in a way that the hours I spent interviewing him didn?t. I paused, and my partner Sahar Issa asked me if I was ok. I took the picture and didn?t forget his face.
On this Iraq assignment, the answers I remember most came from a simple question I asked in the few days I spent reporting on a migration of Assyrian refugees from Baghdad and Mosul to Northern Iraq?s Kurdish controlled provinces. Most Assyrians have left Baghdad because they were caught between sectarian killings earlier in the war.
I wanted to meet them because I?ve been writing a story every other month or so in Modesto about the hundreds of Iraqi Assyrian refugees who have been moving to the San Joaquin Valley, escaping the war. In fact, I set up these interviews through Suzie Younan (note: this is Ashoor's cousin), a woman who works at the Stanislaus Economic Development Alliance and is positively one of the proudest Assyrian?s I?ve ever met.
At some point in the dozen or so interviews I did in a Christian city outside of the Kurdish capital of Irbil I?d ask, ?I live in California city with many Iraqi Assyrians. What do you want to say to them??
?Come back,? pleaded 20-year-old John Khora, who volunteered his time this summer to build up an Assyrian political bloc gunning for seats in the Kurdish parliament. ?Please come back.?
?Come back, even though there are problems,? said Father Isha Najiba, an Eastern Assyrian priest in Ainkawa. ?Come back and we can live like before.?
Maybe it was the way they said it. Maybe it was knowing that the odds are against anyone who has fled either Saddam Husseim?s regime or the chaos of the past six years ever returning to Iraq for more than a temporary job or a family visit.
Their appeals stayed with me and helped me get a better understanding about what it means for Assyrians, the oldest nationality in Iraq, to lose their homeland. I felt newly embarrassed for all the times I heard the Assyrian language as Arabic and identified it incorrectly in Bee stories. I didn?t know.
Assyrians began moving to Stanislaus County about a hundred years ago when a group from Iran started settling outside Turlock. Since then, Assyrians have arrived in waves, fleeing persecution in Iran, then Iraq, then Iran, then Iraq again. If you check the numbers of refugees moving to Stanislaus County you can see that both of those countries are losing their Assyrians to the San Joaquin Valley now.
Iraq might have a quarter million Assyrians left, down from between 800,000 and 1.5 million before the war. It might have more. No one knows for sure. The people I met in Ainkawa said most of their friends from their old neighborhoods in Baghdad and Mosul are living in Syria and Jordan.
Having such few numbers means they probably won?t get their land back. In that case, Najiba, asked Assyrians living abroad to remember their roots.
?Keep your language. Keep your nationality. Don?t forget it,? he said.
http://thehive.modbee.com/node/15167#comment-99039
