Assyrian Demography: Between Deteriorating Empires and Colonial Expansion

Contextualising the Assyrians, starting in the late nineteenth century in the region of Iraq, begins by distinguishing them socially and geographically (which sometimes includes dialect and ecclesiastical adherence) into two major categories. While the two groups had a notion of shared ancestry there were some distinctions that waxed and waned throughout the centuries.

The first group comprised those centred in and around the cities of Mosul, Arbil, Kirkuk, Zakho and Dohuk in modern-day Iraq, most of whom were converted from the Church of the East/Nestorianism (though bastions of Nestorians remained in and around the Barwar and Sapna regions and elsewhere) or Orthodoxy (referred to predominantly as Jacobite) to Catholicism primarily via Dominican missions. Many were urban dwellers, some having lost their native Assyrian-Aramaic language to Arabic and were thus Arabised. Others who had retained their mother tongue lived in large semi-rural regions.

The second category of Assyrians hailed from the region of Hakkâri in today's southeastern Turkey and Urmia in northwestern Iran. They fled during the Great War into what would become Iraq. They were typically rural, predominantly of Nestorian ecclesiastical background in Hakkâri with some Uniate Catholics, while the Urmia Assyrians numbered many Protestants, Catholics and Russian Orthodox. The Hakkâri segment also made up the bulk of the Iraqi Levies in the latter years of their institution, alongside Assyrians of Barwar and Sapna.

In both cases, the Assyrians were native to the region of northern Mesopotamia, which would later find itself divided by Western political entities during colonial expansion. Not unlike the scramble for Africa following the Berlin Conference in 1884, Assyrians, like many native African peoples, found themselves fragmented by arbitrarily created boundaries that would become the basis for internal and external components of otherisation.