The Christian communities of Syria and Iraq have survived 2,000 years of tumult and war. In some of them, prayers are still said in Aramaic, the language that Jesus used in daily life. These communities now tremble on the brink of destruction.A long, informative article. The media are not ignoring this situation, or I would not have articles to link to like the one above. But at the same time there is not the outrage in the West that one routinely finds for much less momentous problems happening to Westerners. This is unfortunate.
The numbers are stark. Almost 1.5 million Christians lived in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Between the U.S.-led invasion that toppled his regime in 2003 and the rise of Islamic State, three-fourths of the country's Christians are believed to have fled Iraq or died in sectarian conflict. The carnage continues. Of the 300,000 Christians remaining in 2014, some 125,000 have been driven from their homes within the past year, according to a March report on "60 Minutes."
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Related article: An Assyrian Woman's Struggle for Her People's Future (Diana Darke, www.alaraby.co.uk, reprinted by AINA).
A Syriac [Assyrian] Christian woman is challenging sexual and religious discrimination in conservative southeastern Turkey and building bridges with her co-religionists fleeing persecution at the hands of the Islamic State group in Syria.I have been following the Syriac Studies program at Mardin's Artuklu University since it was announced in 2009. See here and follow the links. It sounds as though it has been pretty successful.
In the southeastern Turkish municipality of Mardin, the 26 year-old co-mayor, Februniye Akyol, is a local girl from the Syriac Christian minority.
Despite the nearby border with Syria having existed for nearly a century, those in her Syriac community retain close ties with family members on the other side.
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Never had she envisaged a political career. As the first local Syriac Christian woman to leave her home and go to university in Istanbul, everyone assumed she would use her education as an escape route to Europe, like many Syriac graduates before her.
Instead Februniye returned and began an MA at Mardin's Artuklu University in Syriac cultural studies, the only such course on offer in Turkey.
Then, with only two months to go until local elections scheduled for 30 March 2014, Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), made the radical suggestion that a Syriac woman should run for co-mayor alongside Ahmet Turk, the respected 72 year-old Kurdish candidate.
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Recent posts on modern Aramaic-speaking Christians and their current persecution in the Middle East are here, here, and here, with many links.