On a sizzling summer afternoon in 1974, my mother was trailing behind me, running hastily home to escape one of the stone battles that raged between neighbourhoods in Syria's northeastern city of Qamishli.

Once we crossed the sand bridge that separated the Assyrian quarter from the rest of the city, we were out of the slingshots' range. This one was the last battle youngsters from the Assyrian quarter fought against Khanika, a neighboring Kurdish quarter, as the government soon tightened its policing of neighborhoods.

The weapons in the battle were giant slingshots (called stone canons) and ghee can lids; the ammunition was stones. It was like a real war with trenches dug along the frontlines of the fighting neighbourhoods. At the time, I was seven years old. I didn't understand what was going on; why such wars broke out. The only thing my mother told me was: "It's a fight between us and the Kurds."

I don't remember the logic behind those fights and how they were planned or started. But I do recall that the Assyrian quarter was vibrant and buzzing with life and robust youngsters ready to defend it and shut it off to intruders.

"It was the most active period of my life," recalls Ashour Ileya, 47, an Assyrian plumber who lives in the Assyrian quarter. "It was like we were doing something big, like defending our community."

Then, more than 400 Assyrian Christian families lived in the neighbourhood's mud houses, which sprawl into the eastern part of the city. Now, only 30 Assyrian families live there and only two churches are still standing.

Almost all Ileya's friends and most of his relatives have left for the U.S and Europe. He is waiting for his American visa to be issued as well. The overall population of Qamishli was around 90,000 in the mid 1970s, according to official statistics. Assyrians were estimated to represent more than half the city's population. Today, Christian Assyrians represent slightly more than 20% of the city's 300,000 people.

Christians represented 13-15% of Syria's seven million people in the mid 1970s. Today they represent less than 10%, or about 1.7 million people, according to a U.S State Department report.

The country's Assyrians are concentrated in the al-Jazeera region, about 400 miles northeast of Damascus. The region, the largest among Syria's 14 provinces, includes Hasaka, al-Malikeya and Qamishli. They also exist in Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and Iran in varying numbers. The Assyrians once dominated the Middle East. In the seventh century B.C, their empire stretched from today's Iraq through southern Turkey to the Mediterranean. They were among the first converts to Christianity and are divided into several churches, including the Catholic Chaldean, the Syriac Orthodox and Catholic and the Church of the East.

The Christian exodus from the Middle East came to light after the news of Iraqi Assyrians escaping the violence in their war-torn country following Saddam Hussein's fall in 2003 made it onto the international news agenda. Almost half their population fled Iraq, leaving behind only around 700,000.

But the Arab leaders remained silent to their plight. The most recent Arab summit in Damascus, in March 2008, took no notice of their dilemma. The final communiqu