
The Assyrians and the ‘Autonomous Administration’
After the outbreak of Syria’s civil war, the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its military wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG) exerted control over wide swathes of North Syria in 2012, declaring an ‘Autonomous Administration’ in the areas under its control. Amongst its foremost allies in this endeavour was none other than the Syriac Union Party (SUP). Hanna Taghlat, a member of the central committee of the SUP (who also serves as the vice-president of the Cultural Commission for the province of Jazira, on behalf of the Autonomous Administration), explained the attraction of the Kurdish alliance to Raseef22. “The idea of a democratic nation formed a social contract between the autonomous administration and Assyrians,” he says. Taghlat points out that the new reality which the region found itself in from 2012 (following the withdrawal of the Assad regime from wide swathes of Northern Syria, and the subsequent assumption of control by the Kurdish PYD) presented the Assyrian population with new opportunities – enabling them to participate in the Autonomous Administration as well as establish their own military and security forces. The underlying ideology driving this pursuit, he says, can be ascribed to the ideas of the Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan: one of the founders of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a guerrilla group which has been at war with Turkey for more than three decades (and designated as a terrorist organisation by various Western governments). Imprisoned in Turkey since 1999, Öcalan’s political theories evolved whilst behind bars – notably building on the concept of ‘democratic confederalism’, which Taghlat says stresses equal representation for different ethnic and social components, and which the PYD claims to be applying in North Syria.
The Assyrians’ new armed forces
Despite being largely tied to the example set by the Kurdish PYD of trying to avoid large-scale fighting with the Assad regime (by contrast to the opposition Free Syrian Army), the regime’s preoccupation with fighting rebel forces elsewhere nonetheless provided Assyrians with the space to form their own armed formations. In the words of the commander of the Syriac Military Council, Kino Gabriel: “We were born out of the womb of the Syrian crisis.” The Syriac Military Council was founded as the armed affiliate of the Syriac Union Party in 2013, two years after the outbreak of protests against the Assad regime. The Syriac Military Council would later join the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – an anti-ISIS military coalition which would receive significant support from the US-led International Coalition, and conquer vast territories in the process (the SDF reportedly controls a quarter of Syrian territory, including the bulk of the country’s oil fields).

The role of Assyrian women
The circumstances of the Syrian war have not only propelled the men of the Assyrian community to the forefront of events, but have also entailed a considerable social shift in the role of its women. Elizabeth Koreya is a leader in the Syriac Union Party, and also serves as the joint vice-president of the Autonomous Administration’s executive council in North East Syria. “We have a complete openness as Assyrian women,” she says, “but the society around us dressed us in a tight [constrained] fitting.” According to Koreya, the role of Assyrian women was restricted before the war to housework and raising children – whilst the Church added another impediment: “The woman could not do anything except after consulting the church,” she says. A turning point would take place in 2012, after members of the community were kidnapped. Facing the rise of ISIS – which Koreya describes as the “harshest” experience to face the community – many Assyrian women fled with their families to Europe. Others however began taking “slow and fearful steps,” in her words, to “organising themselves politically and inside civil society organisations.” These she continues embroiled themselves in the armed formations, accordingly “forming the Beth-Nahrain Women’s Protection Units to join the fight against ISIS.”
The Assyrian church: praying to authority
Whilst the above overview of the dominant Assyrian force to have arisen from the vacuum of the Syrian war – as constituted in the Syriac Union Party (SUP) and its military (Syriac Military Council) and security (Sutoro) wings – is useful in giving us a broad glimpse of the (much-ignored) input of Assyrians in the conflict, no complete picture can be painted without examining the role of the Assyrian Church as well as the SUP’s political competitors. We put this question to Hanna Taghlat. To start with, what were the nature of his party’s disagreements with the Assyrian church? Hanna’s response was candid: “Syriac is the language of a people, not only the language of prayers.” However, that’s not all there is to the issue. Considering the tensions which have existed throughout the war between the Assad regime and the SDF (of which the SUP is a part) on the one hand – which have sometimes escalated to the level of significant armed clashes – and the pro-regime loyalist stance taken by the Assyrian church on the other, it is safe to surmise that the dispute cannot be reduced only to a matter of cultural disagreements, but has a clear political dimension.
The language question
Pastor Elya points out that there are two forms of Syriac, one spoken in church and a more colloquial form spoken on the street. The most common form is ‘Turani’ – a dialect derived from the mountainous region of Tur Abdin in southern Turkey, which previously served as a cultural and monastic centre. Efforts to transform Syriac into a taught language in schools however have constituted the “the most difficult variable in the equation,” says Hanna Jallinos, the joint president of ‘Olf Tau’ – an institute which specialises in teaching Syriac. Jallinos points to the history of Syriac schools in producing prominent scientists and translators, before the Ba’ath party transformed the language solely into a dialect for prayer, he says. Today, most Assyrian children are taught the language orally in their homes; however, the lack of the necessary knowledge of grammatical rules poses a serious issue, not to mention the recent influx of Kurdish and Arabic words into the language.