Assyrian Catholic Church located in Baghdad, Mesopotamia
The Assyrian Catholic Church is the basis of the Christian church in the Middle East, which has several million adherants in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, Persia, and Turkey. After the partitions of the 1920s which partitioned the Ottoman Empire, the European Allies paritioned the Middle East. They assured Christians tolerance in the Middle East, and for the next 20 years, until the outbreak of the Second World War, the Christian Church grew at a moderate pace. From the end of that war until the 1960s, however, the church was oppressed in much of the region. In 1984, the Assyrian Church of the East finally came into full communion with the Bishop of Rome, and the church became the Assyrian Catholic Church. After the NATO-led invasion of Mesopotamia in 2003 and the ouster of the dictator Saddam Hussein, the Allies, at the insistence of the German contingent, wrote religious tolerance into the new Mesopotamian constitution and freedom of religion for all religions, including the Assyrian Catholic Church. Since then, the Mesopotamian church has grown to over 2.5 million adherents.