ABSTRACT
Assyrians have become twice scattered: they live in diaspora in the Middle East and they live in diaspora outside the Middle East. Assyrian communities everywhere have experienced displacement, even those who have been forced to move from places like El Qush and Ankawa to Baghdad (in Iraq) or those pressured to abandon Sanandaj, Maragha, and prevented from resettling in Urmia (in Iran). Thus at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are about an equal number of Assyrians living in Middle East diaspora as in diaspora outside the Middle East. In the Middle East, no coherent Assyrian community exists that has not been displaced within the twentieth century except around Mosul, the site of ancient Nineveh.1 Many Assyrians born in the first two decades of the twentieth century had, by the close of that century, moved or been displaced three, sometimes four times.
