| |||||||
| Anthem | "Kha Roomrame" | ||||||
| Capital | Ninwe | ||||||
| Largest city | Ninwe | ||||||
| Other cities | Atur, Babil, Erbil, Qaraqosh, Bartella, Karamlish, Sinjar | ||||||
| Language official |
Syriac languages | ||||||
| others | Kurdish, Arabic | ||||||
| Religion main |
Syriac Christianity | ||||||
| others | Catholic Christianity, Yazidism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Islam | ||||||
| Ethnic Groups main |
Semitic | ||||||
| others | Iranian | ||||||
| Demonym | Assyrian, Syriac | ||||||
| Government | Council democracy | ||||||
| Legislature | Supreme Council of the Assyrians | ||||||
| Malikah | Vian Dakhil | ||||||
| Prime Minister | Yonadam Kanna | ||||||
| Population | 4,750,000 | ||||||
| Established | February 1, 1918 | ||||||
| Independence | from Ottoman Empire | ||||||
| declared | February 1, 1918 | ||||||
| recognized | October 15, 1919 | ||||||
| Currency | Assyrian Siqlu | ||||||
| Time Zone | UTC +3 | ||||||
| summer | not observed | ||||||
| Internet TLD | .as | ||||||
The Republic of Assyria (Standard Assyrian: ܩܘܛܢܝܘܬܐ ܐܬܘܪ, alternatively the State of Akkad or the Assyrian People's Republic) is a nation located in the northeastern part of the Middle East, between Lakes Van, Urmia and the Tigris river, with a salient off up into the city of Babylon (Arabic: Al-Hila), as a dividing zone between the two regional rivals of the Islamic State and Aryanam. Assyria is generally viewed as an Eurasian protégé and a safe haven for most Christians in the Middle East, although it is a heavily controversial state because of its treatment of Sunni Kurds and Arabs during the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Assyria is one of the most powerful states in the region, with a modern and large military, an advanced economy with an large gross domestic product, both total and in capita, and close relations to many of the superpowers. It is one of the states closest to the Concert of Europe outside of the continent.
Assyria, created during the Great War by British troops which had valued the Assyrian Liberation Army in its fight against Ottoman troops, and the death of 275,000 Assyrians in genocide campaign by the Turks and Muslim Kurds. Assyria soon experienced nearly 40 years of consistent Socialist rule, both by election and by military rule, during which most Muslim Kurds and Arabs were either expelled from the country or deprived of many rights. Many children from Muslim families were given to Jewish, Assyrian and Yazidi ones, which further reduced the Muslim population. This technique of ethnic cleansing was ended after the fall of the government of the military in 1947, but led to a mostly Christian nation and the destruction of much of the Muslim minority.
Since then, Assyria has become a representative democracy with proportional representation and universal suffrage. The modern Assyrian government, still dominated by the Assyrian Socialist Party, having moved from an overtly Marxist position to a social democratic centre-left one, highly respects human rights of all its citizens. The country has the highest standard of living in the Middle East (something hotly contested by Judea) and one of the lowest poverty rates in the world.
History[]
The Assyrians are an ethnic group that has existed in the region of Mesopotamia and the Hakkari (southeastern Anatolia) since Antiquity. They speak the Aramaic language, descended from the Aramaic spoken by Semitic invaders that became the ethnic population of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, amongst the greatest in antiquity. The grammatical structure of Aramaic and an extremely large portion of the vocabulary descend from Akkadian, amongst the world's oldest written languages, which is heavily influenced by Sumerian, the oldest written language in Earth.
Assyrians were amongst the first people to convert to Christianity, but they split from the Chaldcedonian mainstream in 401, following Nestorian teachings that claimed Jesus had two forms; a divine and a human one, which was very different from the Chalcedonian average of a human-divine duality. This was a move supported by the nearby Persians, which long protected the Assyrian population as a counterweight to the Roman Empire to the west. However, Assyrian people were unable to reassert national independence throughout the pre-Islamic period.
The Aramaic language was further marginalised after Muhammad's conquests starting in the 600s, when Arabic, another Semitic language, arrived on the region. Most converts to Islam eventually Arabised, while the few that retained the Christian faith in the north continued speaking Aramaic.
The Assyrians continued dwindling in size during Islamic rule until the 1800s, where a national awakening began in the region. While the Ottomans attempted to contain that by dividing Syriac Christians amongst three different millets and committing murders of many Christians in the Hakkari region and Syria, fighting this Christian national belief for pan-Islamic beliefs that would contain the region under an united Sunni Caliphate. The Mosul Massacre, the worst there, killed 645 Assyrians in a day. This alienated the Assyrian people in the Ottoman Empire, which meant that, in 1915, when war broke out, Assyrian tribal forces from several different clans were banded together into a single command, and created into the Assyrian Liberation Army. Aided by the Yazidis, which joined the ALA in large numbers, and several different supplies of aid, first from the United Kingdom and later from the Eurasian Union, the ALA seized large parts of the Hakkari region and northern Mesopotamia.
As several small Assyrian towns fell, the Muslim forces found the threat to be too imminent. Kurdish and Turkish militias, the Peshmerga and the irregular sectors of the Ottoman army, began targeting unoccupied Assyrian and Yazidi villages, murdering people. This massacre eventually came to be recognised as a genocide, and it is estimated that 275,000 Assyrians, 25,000 Yazidis and 500-1000 Arab Christians were murdered in Assyrian towns during the Great War. These news shocked and horrified British and German people, and led to the striving for a creation of an Assyrian state in the region.
The Urmia Manifesto of the United Free Assyria, written by Freydun Bet-Abram Attoraya in 1917 and signed and published in 1918, declared the independence of the People's Republic of Assyria, an independent state with overtly Marxist undertones in North Mesopotamia and the Hakkari Region. As parts of the Assyrian Liberation Army, now renamed the Assyrian People's Army, continued fighting together with the Allied forces, expanding to the Euphrates river.
War breaking out between Kurdish peshmerga, the Imperial State of Persia, and Lawrence of Arabia's Hashemite forces led to a possible collapse of Allied cooperation in the Middle East at a time in which the Ottoman Empire had not yet fully collapsed. This proved a great danger, especially to Assyria, which was dependent on cooperation. Assyria and Judea joined in, seizing a strip of land officially controlled by the Hashemites in Mesopotamia close to the Hashemite-Iranian border. This move was widely regarded in Assyria as a race to recover Babylon, but outside of it to form a buffer between the two states. The Assyrian territories proved an effective way to reduce the front lines to the Basra Swamp, which led to peace eventually being signed. Since then, Assyria has remained as a friendly buffer state between the two enemy regional powers.
Assyria was recognised as independent shortly after the war, as revolution in Turkey forced the nascent Republic to recognise the new states in the Middle East. Soon afterwards, Assyria held its first presidential election, in which Freydun Attoraya ran unopposed with support from the other probable candidate, Assyrian Field Marshal Agha Petros.
The Assyrian Socialist Party Rule[]
The flag of the Assyrian Socialist Party
With Assyria independent, and Freydun Attoraya elected as leader of the Parliament with an absolute majority, the Assyrian People's Republic embarked into major organising schemes. The Republic was to be composed of a Supreme Būlē (Literally, Supreme Council), made out of representatives elected from the councils of every Assyrian tribe, which were to be reorganised into direct democracies rather than tribal monarchies. The period of reorganisation continued throughout most of the 1920s, as small tribes resisted and where overwhelmed by the much stronger APA, with support from all the main tribes, which also had larger sittings in the Bule. The Yazidis were also given a large proportion of seats in the Supreme Bule in thanks to their overwhelming support for the Assyrian cause during the Great War, and were given their own autonomous government around the region of Sinjar.
Freydun Attoraya, often seen as the father of the Assyrian nation, and his wife, circa 1925
Externally, Freydun, a devout Russophile, sought an alliance with Georg Elfvengren's Russian government in 1922, which led to one of the oldest alliances still on foot in the Middle East, with Russia becoming Assyria's protector. The Assyrian government continued experiencing massive internal change. The little pieces of arable land Hakkari had were collectivised to optimise resources; and many desert areas of the Assyrian nation began to experience heavy restoration efforts with Russian financing in order to become productive.
The Assyrian nation experienced a massive outflux of Arabs, that left to both escape Assyrian repercussions towards Muslims from the Genocide as well as to be part of the newly-formed Hashemite Islamic State that united most of the Sunni Middle East. Kurds also left, both to the new nation of Kurdistan and to Persia. However, for Assyrians, the work didn't end here. Many Arabs were removed from their towns, most notably the city of Mosul (to become the Assyrian capital of Ninwa) and that of Hila (that would become Babil), and sent to the Islamic State. Many young Muslim children were taken away from their families and given to boarding schools and Assyrian families (this "Stolen Generation" technique was later copied by regional governments in the Eurasian Union, having previously been used in Australia for some time). These children were homeless, treated badly and many died; to this day, descendants of the Generations are poorer, more propense to drug use and less likely to graduate than native Assyrians or even Arabs that were not stolen.
The policies of ethnic cleansing were increased to a far greater degree after the withdrawal of Freydun Atturaya from politics in 1936, claiming "Assyria is free and owned by the proletariat ... my work in politics is done." His successor was Farid Nazha, who began granting more powers to the APA, which was controlled, at the time, by heavily nationalistic entities in the nation, who believed "Assyria was for the Assyrians". To further bolster the number of Assyrians, they began supporting the arrival of Assyrians from Phoenicia, Kordestan and the Islamic State, especially in several regions that had grown depopulated after the flight of Arabs and Muslim Kurds from the nation.
Massive protests, however, began occurring in the Assyrian territory after Farid Nazha's suspicious death in February 15 of 1947, and his replacing by General Evin Agassi, who began establishing complete military rule. This led to several of the larger tribes of the Assyrian nation, including Tyare, Urmia and Tur Abdin, to their open refusal to acknowledge the new, completely militarised, government, as well as widespread demonstrations by the Assyrian youth. These demonstrations, which originally were brutally crushed down (including the death of 47 Assyrian students in Ninwe in June 4th). Eventually, however, General Agassi was forced to resign for power, and new elections were held.
For the first time in Assyrian history, the Assyrian Socialist Party did not come first in the elections, instead resulting in an abysmal fourth place. Instead, a breakaway centre-left party, the Assyrian Justice Party, was elected, and David Barsom Perley rose to power. Soon, Perley began some deregulation. The collective farming, which had previously been seen as highly effective, was reduced and made optional rather than compulsory (much like the Kibbutzim in Judea), with large patches of land being opened for private usage. This bolstered production of both agricultural produce as well as mining and industry, which prospered under a booming state capitalist economy.
oil drilling began in the 1950s under the Justice Party, and remain as one of Assyria's chief sources of revenue to this day.
The Assyrian economy boomed in the 1950s after the boom of worldwide economy and the development of a healthy lead trading industry that brought prosperity to many of the mines of the Hakkari region, but, more importantly, the discovery of massive oil reserves around the city of Erbil and southeastwards into Aryanam. This massive reserve, the Erbil-Kirkuk Oil Field, was immediately put under exploitation of the Assyrian government, which began funding of a sovereign wealth fund that would begin to finance much of the Assyrian welfare state. This fund, highly similar to that of the Norwegian government established only a few years before, has been lauded for its great purpose at helping the Assyrian economy develop.
Assyrian industrialisation picked up beginning with the opening of Assyrian oil refineries and lead item factories sponsored by the government but controlled by private entities in 1952. As the economy developed and the industrialisation picked up, Perley's government began shifting Assyria's economic position from an overly Marxist position to an openly capitalistic one, with the Assyrian Socialist Party becoming largely Keynesian and starting to follow the beliefs of other centre-left teachings of parties such as the Social Democratic Labour Committee in the Imperial Federation and the Party of Regions and Trudovik Party in Eurasia. This further bolstered economic growth and employment, with the GDP of the Assyrian state, as well as its average citizen's standard of living, shooting upwards at an impressive rate. As the population grew, so did industries, both nationally and internationally. Assyrian cars became renowned worldwide, with the largest export besides petrol rising up to be automobiles, especially those from the prestigious HBM (Hakkari Bitpul'ḥana Ma'šina, or Hakkari Motor Works). The medical industry began developing, especially in eastern Assyria, around the city of Erbil, which rapidly became the most wealthy of all cities in Assyria.