Iraq's cultural authorities have revealed a discovery that could redefine the scale of Assyrian art: a six-meter-tall winged bull, or lamassu, recently uncovered in Mosul. The find, announced by Culture Minister Ahmed Fakkak al-Badrani on Iraqia News, dates to the reign of King Esarhaddon in the 7th century BCE (681--669 BCE), when the Neo-Assyrian Empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to Egypt.
As the Costs of War project has documented, the US invasion of Iraq and its aftermath (including interventions, the rise of militant groups and terror attacks) resulted in more than three hundred thousand deaths due to direct violence.
Paris (OSV News) -- French Christians are reeling after the brutal murder of Ashur Sarnaya, a 45-year-old disabled Iraqi Chaldean Catholic, stabbed in the throat outside his Lyon apartment. Sarnaya, confined to a wheelchair, was livestreaming on TikTok about his faith when he was attacked -- in front of his own building as he was returning home, by an assailant who fled the scene.
Born in a rural neighborhood of the city's district of Midyat, Beğtaş stopped her schooling as a child at her mother's insistence. She later married Yusuf Beğtaş, a Syriac language educator and head of a Syriac language and culture association. Beğtaş devoted much of her life to raising her five children.
Bern -- On September 17 the Federal Parliament in Bern hosted the Sayfo Genocide Conference, organized by the the European Syriac Union (ESU) in cooperation with the Swiss-Syriac Friendship Group and Swiss-Armenian Friendship Group. The event focused on the mass atrocities committed by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 against the Syriac (Aramean--Assyrian--Chaldean), Armenian, and Greek peoples.
Budapest -- Catholicos-Patriarch Awa III of the Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East recently visited Budapest with a stark warning: Christianity in the Middle East is vanishing. Entire communities are being erased, while the Western world looks away.
Sorya, Iraq -- Chaldean-Syriac-Assyrian modern history is overshadowed by massacres and genocides. After the 1915 Genocide, the Kafno, and the 1933 Simmele Massacre, the wronged Chaldean-Syriac-Assyrian people were subjected to another massacre on September 16, 1969, in the remote village of Sorya, Zakho district of Nohadra (Duhok) Governorate in what is now the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI).
A visiting Assyrian delegation from the United States to the Kurdistan Region told Rudaw that they obtained a landmark approval from Duhok authorities to build a monument in Simmele to honor victims of the 1933 Simmele massacre.
Chaldean Patriarch Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako on Tuesday called for rejecting proposed amendments to the law governing the Endowments Office for Christians, Yazidis, and Mandaeans, warning that the changes could undermine the identity and rights of these historic religious communities.
The Kurdish group in control of northeastern Syria, under the name of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, has once again demanded that Assyrian schools in the Gozarto region adopt its curriculum. This latest pressure comes after negotiations between the Kurdish entity and the Syrian Ministry of Education in Damascus failed to reach an agreement.
WASHINGTON -- Radical jihadis and other extremist groups have carried out brutal mass killings and other human rights violations against Syria's religious minorities, prompting calls from religious freedom advocates for the United States to take action. Dr.
Sections of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek communities across the globe have greeted Benjamin Netanyahu's recent acknowledgment of the genocides of their peoples with jubilation. His words, spoken during an interview with Patrick Bet-David, were invested by sections of the Greek media especially, with the aura of long-sought vindication.
(AINA) -- There were three Assyrian empires in BC times. The first was from 2000 BC to 1750 BC; the second was from 1365 BC to 1076 BC; the third and most famous and influential was called the Neo-Assyrian Empire, ruling from 911 BC to 609 BC. The following video from the History Time youtube channel presents the history of the neo-Assyrian empire. ...
(AINA) -- The following report by CBN addresses the issue of "protection" of Assyrians by the Kurdish regional government in north Iraq. ...
(AINA) -- The Assyrian Arts Institute (AAI) is an organization founded by Nora Betyousef Lacey in 2017 and claims to support Assyrian arts. AAI has sponsored a few events since its founding, including an Assyrian women's choir.
(AINA) -- On July 12 Iraqi president Abdul Latif Rashid repealed the decree recognizing the appointment of Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako as head of the Chaldean Catholic Church and which appointed him to the office of the waqf (وقف), the endowment which oversees all church property. The details of the events leading up to this action are exhaustively covered in this report by MEMRI.
(AINA) -- The use of the term "minority" to describe Assyrians in Turkey and later in Iraq is deeply tied to the political and nationalist agendas of these nations, particularly in the 20th century. While Assyrians are undoubtedly the indigenous people of the land of the two rivers (Mesopotamia), the term "minority" was used to undermine their presence, deny their historical rights, and...
(AINA) -- 'Syria is free'; thus screamed the Syrians as they celebrated the tumbling down of the criminal regime during a whole week. Thousands, even millions, of Syrians strolled the streets of the entire major cities of Syria. They were from all societal segments, strata, trends, genders, religious beliefs and non-religious ones, convictions, sects, confessions, parties, and orientations.
What if I told you that the core principles driving blockchain technology were actually explored over 5,000 years ago? Not in Silicon Valley boardrooms, but in the dusty archives of ancient Mesopotamia. Sounds unlikely, so let me explain how it worked.
Perceptions of ancient Mesopotamia -- the birthplace of the world's first civilisations, which emerged more than 4,000 years ago across what is now Iraq -- are dominated by stories of divine kings, their monumental stepped ziggurats, and vast libraries brimming with forgotten knowledge.