- Please describe AWB: when was it established, by whom, and what is the objective or statement of purpose for the organization?

AWB was founded in 2007 by young Assyrians from Sweden who had traveled to Tur Abdin, South-Eastern Turkey, to visit their home land. For many, that trip was their first to the land of their ancestors. Most participants were surprised by the low living standards of their fellow men. For some of them this trip became a turning point in their lives and the beginning of Assyrians Without Borders. When they came back to Sweden they decided that something needed to be done, and this time, it was to be done properly. They applied for membership in SFI, a Swedish foundation that controls Swedish humanitarian organisations to make sure that every penny that is donated to the organisation is well spent. This means that our activities are closely watched and that our donors know that their donations actually reach the target group.

AWB is the one humanitarian organisation in Europe with Assyrians as a target group which is being scrutinized by an official national institution. This implies that AWB is an organisation to be trusted, but also an organisation that is professional, which follows Swedish organisational standards and above all which is devoted to its cause. Our overall aim is to help Assyrians in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran to help themselves. By Assyrians we mean all churches included, Syriac, East-Assyrian and Chaldean. By self-help, we mean implementing long term sustainable projects that aim at helping the target group improve its own standard of living. We implement long-term sustainable projects such as infrastructural ones like the construction of water tanks, the reparation of water channels or the installation of generators. We also put much emphasis on education by supporting schools and facilitating access to them. We grant scholarships to Assyrian university students two times a year (once every semester). We implement emergency relief, mostly for refugees, trough the distribution of life necessities such as food, baby diapers or medicine. Last year, we distributed wheelchairs to disabled refugees in Damascus. We work both directly with the target group, through village schools and with the students that apply for scholarships and with partner organisations located in the area. Part of our work is also to raise public opinion about Assyrians’ situation. Everyone that works for AWB is a volunteer.

- What are the current projects of the AWB?

Our latest project was the financing of a school bus which now safely drives Assyrian children to Assyrian schools in the governorate of Duhok, northern Iraq. In total, 85 Assyrian students, living in the remote villages of Koregavana, Bagere and Romta, now travel safely to Akkad Basic School and Nasebin High School, where they can practice their native language freely and where tuition is in Assyrian. We also granted 6 students from Iraq and Syria scholarships of 600 € each. This year’s Christmas project aims at helping 353 Assyrian refugee families from Iraq that now live in Damaskus by providing them with foodstuff. Most of the refugees are widows and orphans and thereby some of the most vulnerable Assyrians in the world at the moment. Our primarily goal is to work on a long term basis, which such an emergency relief isn’t. In a better world, there would be no need for food distributions, but the reality is harder than many would like to believe and these Assyrians are in acute need of a helping hand. We wished to reach out to them and brighten up their Christmas holiday.

- What are some of the success stories of AWB?

Following last year’s Christmas campaign, we collected some of the reactions within the target groups. Jameelah Bazo, one of the 29 disabled refugees who received a wheelchair during our Christmas campaign said: ” Before, I always needed someone to help me in and out of my bed, you gave me new legs and the possibility to move”. Villagers reported, through our partner organization, following our second Christmas project 2010, “Water and Electricity for Assyria” that: “We (villagers of Peposey and Sardarava) are now able to link water to our houses”. They added that “the new water tank in Bebad now is a source of water supply to a large number of households providing us with clean drinking water and the irrigation channel gave life to many farms”.

- What are the best ways for people worldwide to support AWB?

Spread the word about AWB and the Assyrians’ situation. Increase your own and other people’s awareness about Assyrians. Follow our work through our web site: assyrianswithouthborders.com and make a difference by donating or just spreading the word. Inspire people from all backgrounds to understand the situation and find interest in it.

- The plight of Assyrians within the Middle East have been largely ignored by the international media and rights groups, how can we best communicate the urgency of this situation to such audiences to increase awareness and inspire action?

The power of the media is not to be underestimated. Use the new generation of social networking to reach out. It is also important to push through information and recognition to congresses and parliaments. Write reports and send them everywhere, never take no for an answer.

Thank you Robel for your work and for taking the time to inform our readers about it!

To our readers: Don’t forget to support AWB by spreading awareness about the plight of Assyrians and to donate to the initiative.

This article first appeared on our website AssyrianRights.org.

Please consider a donation to the project to help save this ancient Assyrian capital.

The work of the Cambridge University team is coordinated by the Ziyaret Tepe Archaeological Trust, a registered charity (No.1133366). The Big Give, the week December 5th-9th, The Big Give, will double all donations made online via their website to the Ziyaret Tepe Archaeological Trust.

For more information on this project and how to support it, please visit the following the links:

Project:

http://www3.uakron.edu/ziyaret/ztap.html

Donations:

http://new.thebiggive.org.uk/projects/view/10430

Cross-posted on AssyrianRights.org.

A video emerged on YouTube shows the smoke rising from the damage and people congregating near the attacks.

Thirty people, including 20 members of the police forces, were reported injured.

The violence continued when a group of rioters aligned with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) accused the Islamist party Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU) of being responsible for the first wave of attacks. In retaliation, they attacked KIU headquarters in Dohok and Erbil early on Saturday.

Response to the Attacks

The Kurdistan government immediately released a statement about the attacks, saying “We condemn all these inhuman and illegal acts, and demand the Kurdistan people to follow and respect the principles of national and religious co-existence,” and claiming the attacks had been planned in advance by the KIU. President Masoud Barzani also announced a “special committee [that] will investigate Friday’s incidents and bring the perpetrators to justice.”

The KIU also condemned the attacks, and refuted any claims that they were responsible. Instead, they blamed the attack on their headquarters on the KDP, and claimed the riots themselves were a cause of KDP’s poor security management. A KIU activist cited the fact that the two KIU imams in Zakho had long been fired, and that the imam under fire for his comments is supposedly a member of the KDP.

Members of both the KIU and the KDP have accused the other of pre-planning the attack, citing the multiple groups of rioters in multiple towns as proof of a conspiracy. The response to the days of attacks has revealed the increasing tension between all of Kurdistan’s important political players, and particularly the KIU and KDP.

Who the original rioters were supporting and who they were sponsored by is still a hotly contested question, and between the arguing between the KDP and KIU, the mainly Assyrian and Yazidi victims of the riots have been sidelined. A website dedicated to reporting from Kurdistan’s mainly Assyrian Christian town, ankara.com, has reported that owners of the shops that were burned in Zakho on Friday have received pamphlets threatening their business and their lives should they reopen their shops once again. The distributors of the pamphlets are unknown.

President Barzani’s committee has been established in order to find the identity of the perpetrators, and it remains to be seen what the results of the committee will be in the coming weeks. The political bureau of the KPD endorsed President Barzani’s decision, saying “We, the Political Bureau of Kurdistan Democratic Party, support the work of the committee which has been appointed by the President of the Region for investigating this matter and offer them our full support.”

On August 7th, 1933 , an initial act of the newly independent state of Iraq was the massacre of Assyrians in the region of Simele by the Iraqi army under the command of General Bakr Sadki. The massacre resulted in the deaths of 3,000-6,000 Assyrians, many of whom were women and children. Assyrians worldwide commemorate August 7th as the day of their Martyrs. This day also honors and remembers those that perished in the 1914-1923 genocide in the hands of Ottoman Turkey, the victims of the genocidal Anfal campaign, and all others that have died due to cultural and religious persecution.

We chose August 7th as our launch date to join in commemorating and remembering the lives of these fallen Assyrian martyrs while also acknowledging and supporting the Assyrians of today in their struggle for cultural survival, genocide awareness, political representation, and human rights recognition as an indigenous, ethnic people of the Middle East.

Join the cause. 

A transcript of the podcast is below (it has been slightly edited for clarity:)

Q: Can you first introduce yourself?
A: I am Firouz Khandjani, I am a member of the National Council of Church of Iran.

Q: Can you describe the situation of Christians in Iran?
A: Yes, we are facing the worst persecution in Iran since the beginning of the Revolution. We can say that the persecution in Iran had two steps, the first step since the beginning of the Revolution was what we may call not hard persecution. Christians would lose jobs. And the opportunity to work were very limited. But since four years ago we can say that we have a hard persecution – that Christians are losing everything, and they are being targeted by security forces everywhere. They used to come in the houses and confiscate everything. Since one year, our leadership in Iran is targeted and Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani in Rasht has been arrested because he asked that his children must receive Christian courses, not Islamic courses. It’s his right. Since January my brother, Pastor Behrouz Khanjani has been arrested too, because he had connections with pastor Yousef and as the National Council of Church of Iran.

Q: And your brother, where is he now?
A: Now he is in Shiraz. And we have limited possibilities to contact him.

Q: How is the Iranian government treating religious minorities in Iran compared with average Iranians? In general the Iranian people within Iran they are treating religious minorities with respect?
A: Yes.

Q: So it’s only the government that is persecuting them?
A: Yes, usually the people are very tolerant. We can say that Iran is a country where many minorities exist. We have several ethnicities in Iran, several religious in Iran. Usually he people of Iran and the minorities coexist without problem. We have no problem with the people. We are Iranians like others and we are accept as such by other Iranians. You may be Sunni, Shia, you may be Christian or Jew, there is no difference in Iran. The very problem is the government that tries to limit the minorities who are considered as “enemies.” We can say that what’s happening in Iran is religious apartheid. We can say that the Iranian government is a racist government because it has discriminating policies against minorities.

Q: What about other religious minorities there – like the Baha’is and Zoroastrians, are they facing similar things?
A: Every minority meet quite the same problem. For example, the Baha’i situation is worse but we can say that even the Armenians and Assyrians who have Christian ancestry are very limited in Iran. You may see for example one area in the past once an Armenian area in Esfahan, New Julfa, the majority are not Muslim, the Armenians left the country. Maybe 80% of Christians left the country since the beginning of the Revolution. The same with Jews or the Baha’is. As you live in the Persian Gulf, you may see that there are many Sunnis live there. They come to work in Dubai or other Sunni places. They are Iranian too. They have the right to stay in Iran to work.

Q: How many Christians are there in Iran? The population of Christians.
A: It’s difficult to say but we can estimate that we have maybe – Greek Orthodox and Catholic Christians – maybe 3 or 400,000 Christians. And protestant Christians, maybe 30,000. Maybe 95% of Protestant Christians left the country.

Q: What’s the best way for people to help?
A: The people have to show they can’t accept in the 21st century we have in the Middle East, in Iran the same situation that minorities used to meet in France 500 years ago. It is unacceptable that in the 21st century, the Christians and other minorities in the Middle East are living the same situation. The people have to express that we have to end the religious apartheid in the Middle East. The people who are living in the Middle East who even come from other countries – they are from these areas, they didn’t come from other countries – and they have a right to live in their countries without problems.

Q: You have a blog that talks about the Christian persecution in Iran?
A: I have a blog discussing the Christian persecution of Iran, yes. It’s http://bereshith.over-blog.com/

Q: Do you have help from other Christian groups around the world?
A: It’s difficult to have information about all the Christian groups in Iran, we may have news about people we know, because we know that there were many Christians being arrested and no one knew about that. And we can only report about the people we know and are sure about them.

Q: That’s the end of my questions – do you want to add anything else?
A: I hope that we will have in the future a better Middle East, where all people, Christians, Jews, Muslims may live together in peace, and other groups. We have the Sabeans, Zoroastrians, Baha’is, and before speaking about the situation of Western countries to express concern when the Hijab is forbidden for example in France, we have to start in our own area to give freedom to all the identities in the Middle East and this is the condition for a better future for our countries.

Leaders need to have better policies toward the people – righteousness and justice is the basis of equality. Better policies will be profitable for everybody.

Interviewer: I agree with you, completely. And I hope one day we will live in a place where all minorities will be respected regardless of their faith, and I really wanted to thank you for the work that you’re doing because a lot of people they witness this persecution and they don’t speak out and they don’t tell us, then the people aren’t aware of what’s going on and how they can help, and I think the work you’re doing is important and that you will continue doing it. So thank you very much. We’ll be writing a post about what you’ve said in this podcast and also show people your blog and help people get the information that they need in order to help out.

Firouz: Thank you very much.

One of my earliest memories of interacting with Christians involves going to our Christian neighbors’ houses on what I later would learn was Easter to get colored eggs. A group of us, Muslim boys would get together and go to Christian houses, every year in a trick-or-treat (minus the costumes) style of collecting candy and colored eggs. That was before I even went to school. At school, I had a number of Christian friends, we had a class called, “Islamic Education” and Christians were asked to leave the classroom for that period, that was the “secular” Saddam’s way of saying that Christians don’t have to learn about Islam if they choose not to, but I don’t really remember it to be a choice, I think they had to leave. I am speaking from memory and not as an expert on education curriculum.

In 1991 Iraqi Kurdistan was freed from Saddam’s regime and in the almost two decades that followed, the Christians of this region have thrived politically, culturally and economically. Let me back this up. Kurdish law dictates that amongst the 11 quota seats of the 111-member parliament, 6 must be filled by Christians, one of which is for Armenians. The proposed constitution of the Kurdistan region lists all of the Christian communities of the region as major components of the Kurdistani society.

The Syriac language whose immediate parent language is Aramaic is taught in Kurdistan’s public schools, students don’t merely take one language class in their mother tongue, the whole curriculum is in Syriac. This system applies to all Christian students for all pre-collegial levels of education. TV and radio stations, magazines and newspapers as well as tens of Chaldo-Assyrian cultural centers criss-cross this region.

Nearly all Christian churches have been renovated and tens of new ones have been built, some of the churches in Kurdistan and in the immediate disputed territories date back to the 7th century AD! According to AINA, 66 churches have been bombed in Iraq since the start of combat operations in 2003, far more than 66 churches have been built in the Kurdistan Region since 2003! Zero have been bombed by the terrorists.

The Christian villages that were demolished by the former regime have all now been rebuilt, thousands of housing units have been built by the KRG for Christian villagers across the Kurdistan region. Additionally, large sums of money have been invested by the KRG in Christian areas in the disputed areas of the Nineveh plains.

While Christians are targeted in the rest of Iraq simply for being Christian, the Kurdistan region has opened its arms for thousands of Christian families who now call Kurdistan home. Not only are they welcomed here and enjoy all the rights as the native Kurdistanis, they are also given financial assistance, in the form of monthly stipends, thanks to the KRG-established Christian Affairs Committee headed by Sarkis Aghajan.

Mr. Aghajan is an Assyrian Kurdistani whose contributions to the enhancement of Christians’ living standards in Iraqi Kurdistan have earned him international recognition, including having been knighted by the sitting pope with the award of knight commander in the order of St. Gregory the Great (rarely given to non-Catholics). Once KRGs finance minister, Sarkis, 48 is now retired and last week at his residence in Ainkawa, he told me that he wants to write his memoirs and complete his mission, hoping that ultimately, other governments in the Middle East would look after their Christian minorities.

Alas, so little of this is reported. On the contrary, last fall, Human Rights Watch released a report on the minorities of the Nineveh plains titled, “On Vulnerable Ground” where they shamelessly ignored the Christians’ golden era under the KRG.

KRG officials are not angels, they are politicians, they do not do it because of the “black eyes” of Christians, they do it for votes and popularity, but the end result is that a generation of Christians are now fluent in their mother tongue, that their villages are built, that their political rights are protected, that their culture is thriving and that their golden age in modern Iraq is now, here in Kurdistan.

Just last week, the region’s President, Mr. Massoud Barzani ordered Kurdish universities to accept 2000 Christian college students from Mosul to continue their education here in Kurdistan. Atheel al-Nujaifi, Mosul’s governor was unable to even comment on the Presidents move, mainly because he knows that he cannot protect his Christian citizens, because in Mosul, the terrorist continue to be active and their motto continues to be, “be a Sunni Arab or be dead.”

Apparently he was arrested directly due to content on his blog, where he criticized the Syrian government and its economic policies.

If anyone has any information concerning Osama and his arrest, please send us further alerts so that we can spread the word.

Update: He’s been released from prison, thankfully.

It’s an 8 minute news video, if you have time, please watch it!

(AINA) — A string of demonstrations have been witnessed around the world this summer. The common denominator has been the persecution of the Christian Assyrians (also called Chaldeans and Syriacs) in Iraq.

Thousands of Assyrians, inspired by the first demonstration by the community in the Swedish capital in May, have taken to the streets since then.

Demonstrations have been held in Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Florida, Chicago, Canada, Australia, Sweden and France. In some countries Assyrian communities have arranged more than one demonstration.

The demonstrators from the different continents and countries have been united in one voice calling for the protection of Iraq’s indigenous population, the Christian Assyrians.

Recent reports make visible an ethno-religious cleansing campaign against Iraq’s third largest minority which is at the same time the only Christian minority.

Several districts of Baghdad have already been emptied of their Christian residents after attacks on churches, kidnappings, forced conversions to Islam, imposition of Islamic taxes on non-Muslims and forced hijab dress for Christian women.

The pattern of this ethno-religious cleansing in Baghdad is feared to be repeated in northern Iraq if nothing is done to protect the hundreds of thousands of Christian Assyrians living there on ancestral lands that once constituted the heartland of the Assyrian Empire.

A solution in form of a legal administrative area in the Nineveh plains in northern Iraq is currently being considered to halt the exodus of the Christian Assyrians from Iraq.

The current Iraqi constitution allows for the formation of administrative areas and if it becomes real, the Nineveh plains administrative area would become the first of its kind in an Iraq still spiralling into chaos.

Already inhabited by different vulnerable minorities, both Christian and non Christian, the Nineveh plain administrative area could be the life buoy that will allow Iraq to keep its minorities alive through these difficult times.

The Nineveh plains administrative area would give the minorities living there tools to protect themselves from forced conversions, kidnappings, Islamic taxes and what could be described as a civil war in Iraq.

By Afram Barryakoub

Welcome to The Religion Report.

Stephen Crittenden: The plight of Christian minorities in the Islamic Middle East is one of the 20th century tragedies to which we pay least attention.

From the Copts in Egypt, to the Maronites, the Melkites in Lebanon, Orthodox and Chaldeans, the Christian population of the Middle East is a fraction of what it was, and more vulnerable than ever. Nowhere is the situation worse at the moment than in Iraq. And few groups are more vulnerable than the ancient Assyrian Christian community. In fact, this week the Italian journalist Sandro Magister, has warned of the end of Christianity in Iraq.

In early May in a heavily Christian suburb of Baghdad, a Sunni extremist group began broadcasting a fatwah over the loudspeakers of the neighbourhood mosque: the Assyrian Christian community had to convert to Islam or leave, or die. Their Muslim neighbours were to seize their property.

The men were told they had to pay the gizya – the protection money Jews and Christians traditionally had to pay to their Muslim overlords – and families were told they could only stay if they married one of their daughters to a Muslim.

More than 300 Assyrian families have fled, mostly to the north into the Kurdish region of Iraq where they are not welcome either They are sleeping in cemeteries, they have no food, more than 30 of their churches have been bombed, their children are being kidnapped and murdered.