During the Middle Ages the Crusaders hoped that the armies of Prestor John, ruler of a mighty Christian empire, would come from the East and sweep the Moslem infidels from the Holy Land. Unfortunately, the Assyrian Christians ruled no such empire; rather, they were a beleagured minority within their own lands. Their situation has not improved today, as 1 million Iraqi Christians find themselves under the thumb of one of the world's most brutal dictatorships. The Assyrian Christians have frequently found themselves victimized by emperors professing various faiths, and still have maintained their culture and their religion despite all odds. In a region filled with bloody history, the history of the Assyrian Church is among the bloodiest … and the proudest.

The Assyrians were among the first people to convert to Christianity, and among the first to send out missionaries. Assyrian churches dating to the 1st century have been discovered in China, while in the 5th century Assyrian Orthodox clergymen could be found throughout India. Marco Polo, writing in the late 13th century, recorded that of the six kings to be found in the heart of India, the greatest was an Assyrian Christian. Unfortunately, they soon found themselves caught up in the political strife which accompanied Christianity's rise as a world religion. First they were persecuted by the Magians, the Persian priests who ruled the area. Those regions which fell under the control of the Roman Empire fared little better, as Christians in the province of Assyria shared the fate of their coreligionists in the empire. In 448 150,000 Assyrian Christians were killed by the Persian emperor in the region of modern-day Kirkuk; a local legend attributes the red color of the gravel to the blood which was spilled there.

The coming of the Arabs made the Assyrian Christians second-class citizens in their homeland. Subject to heavy taxation and constant oppression, some converted to Islam. Others retained their faith, even at the cost of their lives. As the Islamic Empire found itself in constant conflict with the Christian kingdoms on its borders, its Christian subjects found themselves under constant suspicion. Theological and cultural differences had led to the Assyrians being declared heretics by the Byzantine and Roman churches, while the Moslems considered them potential spies. The persecution did not decrease over time; in 1842 Kurdish leader Badr Khan Bey set out to eliminate the Assyrian Christians from the mountains, and succeeded in killing thousands and sending thousands more into slavery. In 1932 the British withdrew from the region, neglecting their promised support for the Assyrian minority which had supported them . The Iraqi government soon thereafter massacred thousands of Assyrian Christians in an orgy of bloodshed, rape and looting which destroyed entire villages.

Today the Assyrian Christians are officially "protected" by Sadaam Hussein's secular Baath party. High-ranking Iraqi officials, most notably Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, are of Assyrian ancestry, and Christian churches can be found throughout the country, particularly in Mosul (known in Biblical times as Nineveh). This does not mean that the persecution has stopped. Under Hussein's program of "Arabization," expressions of Assyrian culture are frowned upon and Assyrians are viewed as "Arab Christians" - while among the Kurdish people they are frequently called "Christian Kurds" and occasionally "filthy infidels." There have been sporadic flare-ups of anti-Assyrian and anti-Christian violence in the Kurdish autonomous zones of northern Iraq, despite the fact that Assyrians have fought alongside Kurds in the various Kurdish militias, and despite the fact that Assyrians were murdered alongside Kurds in Hussein's genocidal "Anfal" program. Once again the Assyrians find themselves between a rock and a hard place. If they support Hussein, they face retaliation from Kurdish terrorists: if they support the Kurds, they become a prime target for the Iraqi war machine.

Should the U.S. and Iraq go to war, the Assyrians have little to gain… and much to lose. Iraq is essentially an artificial entity, a Yugoslavia-like entity consisting of several linguistic, cultural and ethnic groups. The Shi'ite majority has long felt oppressed by the Sunnis who make up a disproportionate part of the Ba'ath Party… and the Kurds, who have long sought their own homeland, have now begun gravitating toward militant Islam. In a crisis, all these groups might unite in their hatred and mistrust of the Christian minority … and the end result could be yet another anti-Assyrian genocide.