Closure of Syrian Schools: Another Bleak Sign for Christians in Syria
By Marlo Safi
September 25, 2018 6:30 AM
Children hold signs reading “Don’t deprive us of our right to education†and “We want our schools, our freedom, and our childhood†in Qamishli, Syria, in August. (Assyrian Policy Institute)
Militiamen expelled teachers for declining to follow a Kurdish-nationalist curriculum.
Eyala Saadi lives in Qamishli, a town in northeastern Syria that was founded in the 1920s after thousands of Assyrians fled the 1915 genocide in neighboring Turkey. Eyala is 27 years old and works as a protection programs officer for a humanitarian organization. She has a degree in law from the University of Aleppo, located about 260 miles from her town. While Aleppo, the largest city in Syria, is infamous for having been the scene of large-scale devastation and carnage that earned it the moniker “Syria’s Stalingrad†among combatants, Eyala’s much smaller hometown of Qamishli and its Assyrian Christian residents have faced a different type of conflict. Theirs has lasted since 1915 but has remained a struggle fought outside the spotlight shone on the brutal fighting in larger cities.
Qamishli is a Christian center of Syria — the Assyrian Christians are ethnically different from Syria’s Arab Christians, but they’ve suffered from similar threats of persecution on the basis of their ethnicities and religion. Qamishli’s pre-war population was about 40,000, with 25,000 belonging to the ancient Syriac Orthodox Church. Today, half of Qamishli’s Assyrian Christians are gone.
Eyala told National Review that many Christians have left Qamishli for other parts of Syria or even Europe. “They emigrated after many explosions in their own neighborhood, because no one will protect them,†she said. But Assyrians are also facing what Eyala describes as a quieter persecution, one that isn’t always as physically violent as bombs, though it could repeat the ethnic erasure that prompted Assyrians to flee from Turkey to Qamishli a century ago.
Read more at: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/assyrian-christians-face-persecution-kurdish-nationalists/
More Christian Assyrian News at:
http://aina.org/Per AINA, There have been Turkish airstrikes on an Assyrian village. So, while the Kurds aren't perfect, I wonder if they could be the least worse deal?
http://aina.org/news/20181003183044.htm
