Assyria (Cherry, Plum, and Chrysanthemum)

Assyria (Syriac: ܐܵܬܘܿܪܵ Āttûrā), officially the Republic of Assyria  (Syriac: ܦܘܿܠܘܿܛܝܼܵܐ ܐܵܬܘܿܪܵ Pûlûṭi'iyā Āttûrā) is a small landlocked country located in the Middle East. It is bordered with Syria to the northeast, Turkey to the north, and Iraq to the south. Assyria is a member of the Commonwealth Confederation.

Ottoman Mesopotamia (1514–1918)
The Ottoman Empire under Selim I defeated the Safavids in 1514 and gained Upper Mesopotamia which then included the Assyrian homeland. Under Murad IV, the Ottomans secured their control over Mesopotamia in the first half of the 17th century following the Ottoman–Safavid War (1623–39). The Ottomans then reorganized Mesopotamia into several large provinces or eyalet. In 1639, under the Treaty of Zuhab, modern territories of Assyria became part of the Eyalet of Mosul and later of the Vilayet of Mosul after the Tanzimat reforms in 1864.

The Mesopotamian Assyrians mostly concentrated in northern part of Mosul Vilayet and the southern part of Van Vilayet in which they maintained their cultural and religious autonomy under the Ottomans. Ottoman administration also fostered a peaceful coexistence among the different sections of Mesopotamian society for over four hundred years. Each religious minority was organised as a millet. Syriac Christians, however, were often considered one millet alongside Armenians until the 19th century, when the Nestorians, the Syriac Orthodox and the Chaldeans gained that right as well.

Outside of the Assyrian homeland in Mesopotamia, the Assyrians had also populated the northwestern part of Iran, especially in the western part of Velayet of Azerbaijan. During the 19th century, the Persian Assyrians experienced a short-lived cultural and literary renaissance with many books and newspapers being published in Syriac language. By 1900, the Assyrians constituted over a quarter of the population of Azerbaijan Velayet and were the largest non-Muslim majority in the Urmia region. Before 1918, there were over 115 Assyrian settlements to the west of Lake Urmia.

Nevertheless, the Assyrians had to suffer from a number of religiously and ethnically motivated massacres under the Ottoman and the Persian rules. The Assyrians experienced a further catastrophic series of events during World War I in the form of the religiously and ethnically motivated Assyrian Genocide (ܫܥܬܐ ܕܣܝܦܐ shatā d-saypā, "year of the sword") at the hands of the Ottomans and their Kurdish and Arab allies from 1915 to 1918. This led to a large-scale migration of Assyrian people from Mesopotamia to Syria and from Persia to Russia. In response to the genocide, the Assyrian Volunteers was formed to fight the Ottomans.

Led by Agha Petros Elia, Mar Benyamin Shimun XIX and Malik Khoshaba Yousip, the Assyrian Volunteers fought alongside the Allies against the Ottomans. Despite being heavily outnumbered and outgunned, the Assyrians scored a number of victories over the Turks and the Kurds. However, due to the collapse of the Russian Empire after the 1917 Revolution and of the Armenian Defense as well as the murder of Shimun XIX, the Assyrians were thrown into chaos and left without allies, leaving them surrounded and cut off from lines of supply. They had to flee to northwest Iran and fight their way to British train lines going to the British Mesopotamia.

Post-war resettlement (1918–1925)
The United Kingdom agreed in the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence that it would support Arab independence if they revolted against the Ottomans. The two sides, however, had different interpretations of this agreement. Under the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916, the British and the French divided each others' spheres of influences at the Middle East into several League of Nations mandates, which became the real cornerstone of the geopolitics structuring the entire region. The agreement gave Britain control over Southern Syria and Mesopotamia.

After the war, the British resettled 20,000 Assyrians from southeast Anatolia and northwestern Iran to northern Mesopotamia in 1918, joining them with the already existing indigenous Assyrian communities of both Eastern Orthodox and Catholic rites in the north, where they formed communities in Baghdad, Basra, and other areas. As a result, approximately three-fourths of the Assyrians who had sided with the British found themselves living in northern Mesopotamia which roughly corresponding with Ancient Assyria, but had now dominated by the Kurds.

Throughout the British Mandate era, the Assyrians were proved to be the British most loyal subjects. Thousands of Assyrian men had seen service in the Mesopotamian Levies, a force that employed to protect the Turkish and Iranian borders of Mesopotamia from invasion. Excellent, disciplined and loyal soldiers, the Assyrians were soon able to dominate it. Because of the Assyrian majority within the Levies, it was known informally as the "Assyrian Levies" or the "Shabanas", a Turkish word meaning a semi-military gendarmerie.

The Assyrians supported the British mandate because they believed that only the British that can protect them from the Arabs and the Kurds. In 1920, the Arabs, both the Sunnis and the Shias, joined by the Kurds, revolted against the imposed British mandate rule. Though the revolt achieved some initial success, by the end of October 1920, the British with the help of Assyrians had crushed it. After the revolt was ended, the British Mandate for Mesopotamia (ܐܬܦܩܕܐ ܒܪܝܛܐܢܝ ܥܠ ܒܝܬ ܢܗܪ̈ܝܢ Itpaqidhā Briṯāni al Bêt Nahrayn) was confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922. The boundaries of Mandatory Mesopotamia included modern Iraq and Assyria.

Although the death of Shimun XIX in 1918 led to a lack of leadership among the Assyrians, nationalism flourished among the Diaspora. In 1924, Naum Faiq founded the Denkha Suryaye (ܕܢܚܐ ܣܘܪܝܝܐ "Syriac Awakening") in the United States to achieve a Syriac language revival. The World Syriac Conference was convened by the Denkha Suryaye on August 3-5, 1925 in Beirut, Lebanon. The conference adopted a resolution proclaiming "Assyrian" as the official designation for Syriac-speaking nation, replacing of "Syriac Christian", "Chaldean" and "Aramean". After the death of his wife in 1927, Faiq immigrated to Mesopotamia and established the Syriac Institute with Alphonse Mingana, George Lamsa and Francois Nau in 1929.

In 1925, Freydun Atturaya, who escaped from the Soviet Union in 1924, founded the Palakha d-Qalaha (ܦܠܚܐ ܕܩܠܥܗܐ "Workers of the Fort") in Mosul with Yousip Salman Yousip and Petros Vasili. Inspired by Labour Zionism, Atturaya viewed northern Mesopotamia as a "fort" to protect the Assyrians from further persecutions and called for a large-scale Syriac immigration to Mesopotamia. He believed the independence could only be achieved through the efforts of Assyrian working people rather than appealing to the international community. In 1926, the Khusana (ܚܘܣܢܐ "Defense") was created by the Palakha as an underground militia to protect the Assyrian settlements from the Arab or Kurdish attacks.

Birth of independence movement (1927–1939)
In 1927, nineteen-year-old Eshai Shimun XXI formally assumed his position as the Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East. Influenced by his aunt, Surma Shimun, the young patriarch viewed himself as the leader of all Assyrians, rather than of his church only. He put himself as a champion of Assyrian nationalism. On October 17, 1928, Patriarch Shimun XXI invited the leaders of other three Syriac churches for a conference in Mosul; it formally endorsed the 1924 Syriac Conference resolution which adopted "Assyrian" as the designation for all Syriac-speaking peoples regardless of religion.