Evening had come over Baghdad, Iraq, nearly sixteen months after the 2003 invasion. Sunday evening services had begun throughout the city, and the 750,000+ Christians, mostly of Assyrian ethnicity, that live scattered across Iraq began to pray. Seven of these Christians died that evening, the evening of August 1st, 2004, and over fifty others lay wounded when coordinated bombs detonated outside of four churches in Baghdad and one in Mosul. Some have attributed this attack to the al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It was the first of many attacks that Islamic extremists have conducted against Iraqi Christians in an attempt to Islamify the country.

Christians in Iraq continue to face persecution on a daily basis. While Shia and Sunni Muslims enjoy a relative amount of protection by their militia groups, and the Kurds in the north have begun to establish a relatively independent state of their own in recent years, Iraqi Christians have no such militia.  For the most part, they have spread themselves throughout the country with no real town to call their own. As a result, they lie open to sectarian violence. Many have left the country after receiving death threats by militia groups. Their perilous emigration sends them to neighboring countries, such as Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, as well as to the U.S., Canada, and abroad. For a people that has lived in Iraq for millennia, this exodus marks a sobering time in the history of the Middle East.

In 1932, the lost civilization of the Assyrians, until that year remaining only in the texts of the Old Testament, came to the light when British archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan unearthed the ancient city of Nineveh. The Book of Genesis tells how Nimrod the son of Cush went to Assyria from "the land of Shinar" and built Nineveh (10:9-12), while Assyrian mythology has it that a man named Ninus built Nineveh. Sargon I first began to draw together the city-states of Akkad in 2371 B.C., beginning a nation that for nearly 1800 years would exert domination over Mesopotamia and nearby countries. Tiglath-Pileser III (747-727 B.C.) expanded the Assyrian empire to include Egypt to the south and the Caspian sea to the east. In the 8th century, sometime around the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III, the Lord sent the Israelite prophet Jonah to the Ninevites to tell them of His plan to destroy their city. According to the Book of Jonah, They responded by putting on sackcloth, bathing themselves in ashes, and turning from their evil ways. Because of their repentance, God forgave them and spared the great city.

According to II Kings, during the reign of Pekah, king of Judah, the Lord sent Tiglath-Pileser III, called "Pul" in Egypt, to invade northern Israel and carry off the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh because of their idolatry (15:27-29). In 612 B.C., however, the First Golden Age of Assyria came to an end when Babylonia, allied with the Medes and Scythians, attacked Nineveh and sacked its temples, palaces, and homes. Nahum the prophet had prophesied that Nineveh would met an untimely end (1:8-11), and so it had. Their king, Sin-shar-ishkun, died in the battle. Modern-day Mosul still contains shattered remnants of Ninevah's temples and architectural greatness, but nothing like it had once been. For the next six hundred years, Assyrian power and dominance would crumble and blow away like desert sand in the wind. Never again would this people achieve such greatness.

After the crucifixion and death of Jesus, the Apostle Thomas sent Thaddeus, one of the disciples briefly mentioned in the third chapter of the Gosple of Mark, to the small kingdom of Edessa. After preaching the gospel there and healing Abdu, an official of king Abgar's court, the nation turned from their worship of Ashur, the Assyrian god, and converted to Christianity. Theirs is the earliest church in the history of Christianity. For coming and bringing the gospel of Christ to them, the Assyrians named Thaddeus "Mar Addai," "mar" meaning "father" or sometimes, more appropriately, "saint" in Syriac, the language of the modern Assyrian people. Because of geographic, political, and even religious boundaries, this Assyrian Church of the East, as it is often called, remained isolated from the Roman churches that arose in the centuries after Jesus' death. By 200 A.D., the Assyrian Church produced its New Testament, written in Old Syriac, known as the "Peshita." This and later Syriac Peshitas became, and remain to this day, important texts for the understanding of Old and New Testament passages. By the sixth century, missionaries from the Assyrian Church had penetrated into Egypt, Syria, Persia, India, Mongolia, and even China. If not for the rise of Islam, the Mongols would probably have wholly converted to Christianity, changing the course of history in the region for centuries to come.

In A.D. 448, Yezdegerd II, king of the Sassanid empire, began a persecution of the Armenian and Assyrian Christians within his kingdom. According to a late account of the massacre that ensued, ten bishops and 153,000 clergy and laity were slaughtered in the city of Karka d'Bait Sluk. This is only one example of many that shows the brutality and religious oppression the Assyrian Church has endured. On average, every fifty years, a massacre of Asyrians has taken place, at the hands of Jews, Kurds, Mongols, Persians, Arabs, and other peoples. Because of their suffering, which dwarfs that of any other church, the late Pope John Paul II called the Assyrian Church "the martyr's church," an unfortunately accurate epithet. In 1998, the Cathlicos-Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, Mar Dinkha IV, traveled to the Vatican to meet Pope John Paul II and institute the first, major step towards increased union between these two, ancient churches.

The Assyrian Diaspora has left these people with no country to call their own, not since the destruction of their kingdom in 612 B.C. The current situation in Iraq and neighboring Arabic countries leaves much to be hoped for. By some counts, 40 to 50,000 Assyrian Christians have left since the invasion of March 2003, and hundreds continue to take buses out of the country every day, leaving Iraq, their ancient homeland, behind.

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