Damascus, Syria -- Gabriel Mushe, member of Syria's People's Assembly and political official of the Assyrian Democratic Organization (ADO), has called for legislation recognizing the Assyrian language and safeguarding the cultural and linguistic rights of Syriacs (Arameans-Assyrians-Chaldeans) in Syria.
Rijsen, Netherlands -- The first thing heard on a Sunday morning at the Syriac Orthodox Church of St. Ignatius Nurono is not Dutch. It is Syriac, part of the Aramaic language family. This ancient language rises with the incense, carried through the church in hymns whose words have been sung by generations of Christians long before the community's families ever arrived in the Netherlands.
What the world knows about the Assyrian empire, it mostly knows from kings. The palace reliefs and the royal inscriptions that shaped that picture came out of one raised mound inside a city called Nimrud, where Austen Henry Layard put his first trenches in 1845. Around that mound lies a walled town of about 340 hectares, roughly the ground area of New York's Central Park.
Ankara -- The exclusion of Sabro, an Assyrian newspaper published in Merde (Mardin), from a financial support programme for minority newspapers run by Turkey's Press Advertising Agency (BIK) remains unexplained on legal or administrative grounds.
Brussels -- As Syria moves through a precarious political transition, European policymakers, church leaders and Syrian representatives are preparing to gather at the European Parliament next week with a message that goes to the heart of the country's emerging political order: the future of minorities cannot depend on sectarian quotas or political bargains, but on a constitution that guarantees...
Some 5,000 Assyrians from Turkey and around the world gathered at the historic Mor Gabriel Monastery in southeastern Turkey's Mardin province for the annual Shahro celebration, a religious tradition dating back about 1,300 years.