MODESTO – Isaac Samow's Assyrian Christian ancestors have occupied Mesopotamia for millenniums, surviving innumerable conquests and massacres.
Now war is again threatening Assyrian culture and language in its native land.
Thousands of Assyrians have fled Iraq since the U.S. invasion. Samow's relatives are scattered through Canada, Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, Greece, Holland, England, Sweden and Germany. Other Assyrians are refugees in Syria, Jordan and Iraq, not knowing whether they can return to cities and towns carved into Sunni or Shiite enclaves.
“My children speak my language, but what about my grandchildren?” Samow said from his home in Modesto.
Successive waves of Assyrians have landed in California's Central Valley, beginning with those who fled a massacre by Turks near the end of World War I.
They were joined by families who escaped Iran when an Islamic revolution overthrew the monarchy in 1979, then by new arrivals escaping the first Gulf war, when Samow, whose hometown is near Mosul, Iraq, came here with his family. An Assyrian community also thrives in Chicago.
But with their numbers now dangerously low in the region where Iran, Iraq and Turkey meet, Assyrians here fear the current wave of migration could mark their end. Community leaders in the United States are working to support Assyrians back home.
The Assyrian American Civic Club of Turlock is housed in a fortress-like hall decorated with winged bulls that have human heads – a traditional Assyrian protective figure known as a lamassus. An old map on the wall shows population centers that no longer exist.
“Once, most villages in that area were Assyrian,” said the club's president, Fred Betmaleck, who is Iranian-Assyrian. “Now there are very few left.”
The club works to keep Assyrian culture alive by hosting a radio station that plays Assyrian music and carries community news, and holds festivals, such as the Assyrian New Year's celebration known as Kha-b-Nissan, in the spring.
Members also raised money through dances and raffles to help Assyrians who remain in Iraq.
“We try to help them stay there as much as possible, because when you leave, you never go back,” Betmaleck said. “We encourage them not to come, but when there's persecution, what can you do?”
For Isaac Samow, staying was too risky.
He and his wife took their seven children – the youngest a 1-year-old whom Samow strapped to his back – on a dangerous hike across the rugged snow-covered mountains between Iraq and Turkey.
He spent all the money he'd saved from his job as a construction contractor to smuggle his family to the dirt-floor tents of a Turkish refugee camp, then to Istanbul. They spent a year and a half in Greece until they applied for asylum with Red Cross help and were accepted into the United States in December 1992.
Now, 15 years and another Iraq invasion later, the family is safe, but they worry about relatives back home, and about the Assyrian future.
“We feel this could be the end of a people who have survived since Babylonian times,” said Zack Samow, 34, Isaac's oldest son.
Assyrian Christians – among the first converts to Christianity – and other ethnic and religious minorities have been particularly hard-hit by the sectarian violence, said Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom and a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Among those leaving are Jews; Sabean-Mandeans, who follow John the Baptist; Yazidis, ethnic Kurds whose religion precedes Christianity and Islam; Baha'i and Iraqi Turkmen, she said.
Many speak English, and work as translators means they're also often seen as siding with the United States, said Bill Frelick, refugee policy director for Human Rights Watch.
Their absence could allow the region to become less tolerant as it loses the diversity that has characterized it for centuries. And that could have long-term geopolitical consequences, Shea said.
