Inside the Kurdish textbooks rejected by Assyrian Schools
The Kurdish group ruling the Gozarto Region claims its new textbooks aim to undo decades of Arabification. A closer look reveals they merely replace it with Kurdification.
Assyrian private schools in the Gozarto Region have once again rejected the curriculum that the Kurdish entity, which has controlled the area since 2012, has tried to impose. The textbooks in question promote a subtle Kurdish nationalist narrative that distorts the history of the region and glorifies the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. Below are a few examples of the content found in these materials.
The Assyria Post
Historical revisionism
One of the primary school textbooks presents a revisionist version of Kurdish history, portraying the Kurdish tribes, whose Iranian origins and later migration into Mesopotamia are well documented, as the indigenous population of the region. The chapter includes a fabricated map of a so-called historical Kurdish homeland that has no basis in historical reality. In the same book, Assyria is reduced to a mere historical reference.
An imaginary Kurdish land is presented in yellow on the map as a historical reality while Assyria is erased in the history school text book.
The section goes on to claim that “there are no clear beginnings to Kurdish history or the Kurdish people, as they are the indigenous inhabitants of their land.” In reality, it is well established that the non-Semitic Kurdish tribes are relatively recent arrivals to Mesopotamia and to the land of Assyria. The irony of this falsification is striking, given that the city of Kamishli, where these textbooks were produced, was founded by Assyrians in the early 1900s. Assyrians remained the majority population in Kamishli and much of the Gozarto Region until recent decades. Moreover, archaeologists have yet to uncover a single artifact from an ancient Kurdish settlement in Assyria or the wider Mesopotamian region.
Glorification of PKK leader
The textbooks also openly glorify Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdish PKK organization. The Kurdish group in control of the Gozarto Region is an offshoot of the PKK. One textbook even includes a section titled “The Morality of Abdullah Ocalan.” Ocalan has been serving a life sentence in Turkey since 1999 for separatist activities. His movement has long been implicated in the killing of Assyrians, beginning in the 1980s, and bears much of the responsibility for the mass displacement of Assyrians from their historic homeland. By waging guerrilla warfare in Assyrian areas, the PKK deliberately drew Turkish military operations into those regions, making it impossible for Assyrians to remain.
This same strategy continues today. In Northern Iraq, the PKK has entrenched itself in Assyrian-populated areas such as Nahla, turning once-peaceful villages into targets for Turkish airstrikes and further contributing to the ongoing depopulation of the Assyrian homeland.
The Assyria Post
