Assyrian Genocide Awareness lecture in Toronto, Canada

by Frederick Aprim

Posted: Thursday, August 21, 2008 at 07:44 AM CT

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Because of the 1991 Gulf War, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees found their way to the neighboring countries of Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Iran. I visited Jordan in 1992 and met with some Assyrian refugees and my life was never the same. In the aftermath of the 2003 Gulf War, Syria, Jordan and many European countries witnessed the flooding of 2,000,000 Iraqi refugees. An additional 2,000,000 are Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). In 2004, Iraq went into chaos that continues to linger today and in the midst of that, a jihad or holy war was declared against the Christians. The Islamists did not discriminate; they murdered infants and elderly, males and females, clergymen and laypersons, they bombed 40 churches. The mass exodus from Iraq resumed, again. For Assyrians, being a refugee is a repeated theme; it has continued in one shape or another since WWI in Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

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