The Assyrians are a Neo-Aramaic-speaking Christian ethnoreligious people indigenous to the Mesopotamian plain of northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and northwestern Iran, tracing continuous communal identity to the ancient Mesopotamian and early Christian periods of the region. Assyrian communities are organized around several historically distinct churches (the Assyrian Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church and the Syriac Orthodox Church among them), and the relationship between Assyrian, Chaldean and Syriac communal identity is itself a genuinely debated question within the community rather than a settled classification. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century violence, including the 1915 Sayfo massacres and the Islamic State's 2014 campaign against Christian towns of the Nineveh Plain, has driven large-scale displacement into a substantial global diaspora, notably in the United States, Sweden and Australia.
Facts
Group TypeSourced to the subject's own accountEthnoreligious diaspora community 1 Typical RegionSourced to the subject's own accountHistorically Mesopotamia (northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, northwestern Iran); now substantially dispersed in diaspora 1 Primary LanguageSourced to the subject's own accountNeo-Aramaic (Syriac) dialects 1 Subsistence ModeSourced to the subject's own accountHistorically agrarian village and urban craft communities across the Mesopotamian plain. 1 Disputed
Population Estimateestimated 3 to 4 million worldwide 1 Sourced to the subject's own accountNo state conducts an Assyrian-specific census, and estimates depend on how closely related Chaldean and Syriac Christian communities are counted alongside self-identified Assyrians. Sources
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