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INTRODUCTION 0.1. Barwar and Its Assyrian Christian Communities

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INTRODUCTION 0.1. Barwar and Its Assyrian Christian Communities INTRODUCTION 0.1. Barwar and Its Assyrian Christian Communities This work is a description of the neo-Aramaic dialect spoken by Assyrian Christians from a district in the Dihok province of Iraq lying adjacent to the border of Turkey known as Barwari Bala. It is a Kurdish name meaning ‘Upper Barwar’, the epithet being used to distinguish it from a region known as Bawari ¥èr ‘Lower Barwar’, which lies further to the south. The Assyrians frequently use the shorter term Barwar rather than Barwari Bala to refer to this district and regularly refer to those whose families originate from there as Barwarnaye. The shorter term will be used throughout this book.1 Barwar borders to the North on the Turkish province of Hakkari, from which it is separated by the Širani chain of mountains. To the South it borders on the district of Íapna, from which it is separated by the Matina mountain chain. On the East it borders on the district of Nerwa-w Rekan, from which it is separated by the Great Zab river. On the West it is bounded by the Xabur river, a tributary of the Tigris, which divides it from the district of Gulli-w S6ndi. The mountain chain North of Barwar was called by the Assyrians ‘the one in shadow’ (†alana) and the one to the South ‘the one in the sun’ (ba-ro≥a). This was because when the sun rose it would strike fi rst the southern mountains, leaving the northern mountains in shade. Two rivers run through the area. The river N6nne fl ows from South-East to North-West into the Xabur. To the North of this the river Be-Xelape fl ows North-West to South-East into the Great Zab. The land is fertile and wooded. In the twentieth century the life of the Assyrians of Barwar underwent a series of devastating upheavals. The greatest physical destruction took place in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Iraqi army destroyed all of the Kurdish and Assyrian villages of the area, as well as hundreds of other 1 The word barwàr is a Kurdish common noun meaning ‘slope (of a hill)’, spelt ‘berwar’ according to the conventional Kurdish orthography (Chyet 2003: 45). It is used in associa- tion with several other geographical names, all of which are in south-eastern Turkey, e.g. Barwar of Qudshanes, Barwar of Sevine, Barwar of Shwa"uta (Fiey 1964: 446). KHAN_f2_1-26.indd 1 8/19/2008 6:20:26 PM 2 introduction villages along the Turkish border region, as part of the so-called "Anfàl campaign against the Kurds. The fi nal wave of destructions took place in 1988, which included the Assyrian village of "“n-Nune (‘Spring of Fishes’), also known as Kani Masi, the administrative centre of the district, lying approximately ten miles North-North-West of Amedia. All the Assyrians of the area were evacuated to refugee camps and subsequently they either settled in the Iraqi towns or left Iraq and joined the Assyrian diaspora communities in North America, Europe and Australia. When the ‘No- Fly-Zone’ was established in northern Iraq in 1991 after the Gulf War, some Assyrians began to return to the site of their villages and rebuild them. The majority of the Assyrian families who originated in the villages, however, remain to this day scattered around the world. Before the "Anfàl campaign the major upheavals suffered by the Assyr- ians of Barwar took place during the Kurdish rebellion against the Iraqi government by Mu߆afa Barzani from 1961 to 1970 and during the mas- sacre and displacement of the Assyrians during the First World War. In the Kurdish—Iraqi war beginning in 1961 large numbers of the Assyrians in Barwar abandoned their villages and fl ed to the Iraqi towns. A few villages were permanently taken over by the Kurds at this time, but in 1970 the majority of the Assyrian population returned. In the First World War the Assyrians of Barwar suffered the fate of the Christian communties of south-eastern Turkey. The Assyrians sided with the Russians against the Turks. In 1915 the Turks undertook an ethnic cleansing of the Hakkari. The vali of Mosul, Haydar Bey, was put in charge of operations. His force consisted of Turkish reserves and local Kurdish tribes. The Kurdish chief of Barwar, Rashid Bek, was given the task of marching on the villages in the local area with Turkish troops. The majority of the Assyrian villages of Barwar were destroyed and many of their inhabitants were massacred. The villagers with their antiquated rifl es were unable to withstand the modern weaponry with which the Turks and Kurds were supplied. Those who managed to escape fl ed into the mountains. The Assyrians from Barwar joined the thousands of Assyrian refugees from Hakkari and sought safety behind Russian lines in the region of Salamas and Urmi.2 At the end of the war in 1918, decimated further by starvation and disease, they were transferred under the protection of the British from Iran to a camp in Baquba, North of Baghdad. In 1920 most of the surviving families from Barwar returned to their villages, 2 Gaunt (2006: 142–145). KHAN_f2_1-26.indd 2 8/19/2008 6:20:29 PM.
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