Napoleon Pattoo
AAS-Iraq President

Beginnings and Official Establishment

It is well known that our people have, in general, lacked effective officially recognized charitable and humanitarian associations. The primary cause of this has been the policies of oppression and persecution against our people by all the regimes that have governed Iraq.

After the events of March 1991, thousands of families left their homes, cities, and villages and fled to the borders of Turkey and Iran, searching for refuge from the terrors of Saddam Hussein's regime. In these areas they remained in the open, under trees in the ravines and the mountains, exposed to cold and rain. Under the supervision of the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM), a group of these refugees organized to distribute financial and other urgent necessities. Later this same group organized the distribution of aid that started being received from international organizations and Assyrians around the world.

After conditions in northern Iraq stabilized with the imposition of the no-fly zone, the refugees returned to ruined villages and cities badly in need of reconstruction. The people lacked the simplest of necessities of living due to the sanctions imposed on Iraq and because of the policies of the Saddam Hussein regime.

The Assyrian Aid Society - Iraq (AAS-I) was formally and officially established in the spring of 1991, growing from the core of the pre-war refugee relief organization. AAS-I was one of the very first humanitarian organizations in the region working and coordinating with the United Nations (UN) agencies just beginning their own local and international humanitarian work in Iraq. AAS-I cooperated with other international and local organizations as well. The humanitarian program of our society quickly expanded to include the distribution of the aid, food, and medicine, plus sending mobile medical clinics to the most remote villages. Village rehabilitation progams included providing agricultural tools and utilities that would provide income and independence, thus helping to maintain an Assyrian population in the Homeland.

As a principal goal AAS-I dedicated itself to accomplishing the teaching of our children in our Assyrian language. This plan required action at every level of the teaching process; specifically, providing the needed Assyrian curriculum books, the transportation of the students, the salaries of the lecturers, the costs of building and maintaining the dormitories, and much much more.

The establishing of social organizations such as the students' unions, youth unions, women's unions, cultural centers, social centers, and sport facilities depended in large upon the support of the Assyrian Aids Society-Iraq, either through the efforts of gaining necessary financial and other support from Assyrians abroad or from other humanitarian and charity organizations.

The establishment of the Assyrian Aid Society of America in the United States was crucial. As our main and most consistent source of funding, AAS-A insured our Society's activities in the Homeland, especially the process of teaching in the Assyrian language.

Our assistance to the needy villages and the needy families in all the cities and towns continued. This need was at its peak, and the living and economic level were at their worst, during the years of the international sanctions against Iraq, but the needs of our people remain.

It is worth noting that the administrative officers in Assyrian Aid Society-Iraq are all volunteers, except for the engineering and technical groups that do receive proper salaries for their work. We may also mention that one of the priorities of the Society has always been to engage our people in voluntary efforts, to engage the villagers who benefited from the projects and the Society's charity activities.

The efforts to develop and expand the AAS-I activities in all the fields continued and grew into specialized departments.

Construction Department

After the uprising of 1991 and the withdrawal of Baghdad regime from the secured no-fly region in northern Iraq, the AAS-I and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) had a direct and effective role in the reconstruction of the villages ruined and destroyed in 1970s and 1980s in Saddam Hussein's notorious Al-Anfal campaign.

Our Society had an effective role in the reconstruction of the villages by implementing civil building projects in different parts of the region. The Society undertook constructional projects such as rebuilding the houses, irrigation channels, water distributing networks, recasting houses roofs, building churches, etc.

The Construction Department consists of engineers specialized in building and construction works. They perform periodic visits to the villages to prepare estimates regarding the building projects needed to be implemented. The estimates are submitted to friendly and supporting institutions and organizations where financial support is secured; once the project has been funded, the Construction Department immediately begins implementation of the project, with periodic update reports regarding the progress of the work.

After the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003 the duties of the Construction Department extended to include the regions of the Nineveh plain. This area had received absolutely no support or care from the toppled regime. We started work immediately and directly upon entering the area, distributing urgent support and aid with food, medicine, etc. The need for several vital service projects was identified and accomplished.

The Education Department

At the very beginning of the formation of the regional government in 1991, the government was lacking in the appropriate material and technical skills necessary to manage all the official public utilities in the region. This was nowhere more clear than in the entire educational process in all its stages. In 1992 when the regional parliaments approved the educational rights for our Assyrian people using our mother language, the duty of supporting this strategic project became the most important priority for our organization. Even before the official approval, AAS-I was providing most of the necessities for these public schools.

Our organization participated in this massive education project by bearing the heavy costs of translating and printing textbooks in Assyrian. In 1996 UNESCO coordinated with the Ministry of Education to assume a larger role in this process.

In the beginning of the project of teaching in Assyrian language, we lacked a complete teaching staff. Thus the lecturers were paid a monthly bonus from our organization, as well as a proper encouraging rewards for the educational staff; we funded the complete costs of transportation for the primary and secondary Assyrian students in the Duhok and Erbil governorates, in additional to providing the furniture for the schools of the two governorates. A special committee was established for education of Assyrian language; it is still in operation and receiving full support from our organization which helps it carry out its duties, including the different school activities that are carried out in different regions supervised by this Society. The most important of these activities are preparing programs for training the educational staff in accordance with the available capabilities. Our Society honors a number of outstanding students yearly.

When the process of teaching Assyrian language reached secondary level, there was no other solution but to gather all of the students in one central secondary school, the Assyrian Nissibin school in Duhok. As a result, we needed to prepare dormitories for the students from other villages and cities that were far from the center town of Duhok.

This was a new and additional to our activities. As a stating point, we rented some houses and furnished them for the purpose, as well as providing three meals daily during the school year for the student of these departments.

The administration of this process requires assigning supervisors for the departments, and assigning cooks and workers for providing the necessary services, while the students attend solely to their studies.

As for the cities and villages near Duhok, the solution was to provide and bearing the costs of transporting the students to and from the schools.

This process lasted for two years until we received a special grant from the Assyrian Aid Society of America to implement a project of building special dormitories. The big project was implemented in the year of 2001.

Thus the paying of the rents in more than one area stopped and the heavy load of the process was removed from the shoulders of the organization. AAS-I continued to pay the costs of food and transportation and the salaries of the workers in the dormitory buildings. Recently, the Duhok municipality began to share in bearing some of those costs.

The headquarters of the Society was built in the same compound allocated for the dormitory buildings. This simplified the process of administrating the student residence as well as relieving us from the payment of rents for our offices.

The Universities and Secondary Education

The Gulf War, international sanctions, the uprising in north, and the neglect of the Saddam Hussein regime severely affected the region's economy. The hardest hit were the poor families. It was very difficult for the secondary graduates to continue their university studying, especially for those students who lived far away from the cities with universities.

Beginning in 1991 the Society worked to address these problems by opening dormitories in Duhok and Erbil for students far from these two cities, providing residence, food, and educational programs. In additional to these continuing services, needy students were further supported in coordination with the ChaldoAssyrian Youth Union.

Health Department

Since the establishment of the Society in 1991, the Health Department participated greatly in relieving the agony of our people, particularly the most remote villages. Forming specialized mobile health units, the Health Department performed regular visits to the villages most in need of health and medical care. These units investigated the different areas and provided medicine and health services at no cost to the poor villagers.

The Society foresaw the urgent need for constructing health centers in cities and towns, and to provide pharmaceutical and medical services at little or no cost. The charity clinic of our society in Duhok city center had a great role in providing medicine and treatment for all the people of Duhok regardless of their religion or ethnicity, in difficult times characterized by the scarcity of medicine.

It was the same with the charity clinics in Ankawa, Shaqlawa, Zakho and Sersink, some of which are still providing humanitarian services after the liberation 2003. This Department participated greatly in providing help, aid, and support in performing many great relief programs. A few days before the start of theSecond Gulf War a great number of families fled from big cities like Baghdad, Musol and Kirkuk, fleeing to the mountains and villages in north Iraq. Medical units were formed for visiting and investigating the affairs of these refugee families in different cities and villages, providing the necessary services so desperately needed in the winter.

At the liberation of our cities and villages in the Nineveh plain, our relief and medical units were the first to provide help for our people in Baghdeda, Alkush, Teleskof, Barttela, Caremles, Batnaya, and all other villages.

After the liberation was achieved and some stability was achieved in the Nineveh plain, our Department started immediately to build charity clinics similar to those in Duhok and Erbil.

We now have a charity clinic in Alkush, Baghdeda, and Barttela. We look forward to opening similar clinics in other regions. These clinics provide people of the area with its health services at little or not cost to them.Those clinics have a direct humanitarian role in relieving the suffering of our people, particularly the most needy ones.

The Aid and Relief Department

The Aid and Relief Department was the foundation that the Society was built upon, the direct reason for first forming the Society in 1991.

After the First Gul War the Aid and Relief Department performed periodic programs to help needy people in accordance with the Department's capabilities and outside support received for this purpose, in addition to the aid provided for the needy people in accordance with the requests to help in bearing the costs of treatments and surgical operations.

The refugee families fleeing from the south in 1993 required a massive relief program. Following our call to friendly internation organization, particularly the Assyrian Aid Society of America and the National Assyrian Society in Chicago. regular visiting health units were formed which visited and investigated the villages that received the refugee families and provided them with different humanitarian aid, foods, medicine, and other needs.

Supporting Public Organizations

In addition to the direct humanitarian aid AAS-Iraq provided and its participation the construction of the region, the Society had a major role in supporting other public and social organizations in the region, believing that role of these organizations is crucial to building a modern civil society.

We were and still remain the main supporting source for the Assyrian Women Union , the Student and ChaldoAssyrian Union, and the supporters of other cultural, social, and sport centers.

The Supporting Sources

The most important aspect of our Society is the existence of similar societies around the world upon which we depend to carry out of our humanitarian and charity projects. From the very beginning there has been the Assyrian Aid Society of America (AAS-A) which was established at the same time as the formation of our Society in Homeland. One of its single most remarkable contributions was its working with the United States State Department and USAID to rebuild the destroyed villages. In addition, AAS-A has carried the full cost of constructing the dormitory departments for Nissibin secondary school, as well as so many other projects. We depend mainly on the monthly support of AAS-A in covering the teaching costs since 1992 and through to this very day.

After that, the Assyrian Aid Society of Canada (which originally was a branch of AAS-A) was established, followed by the establishment of AAS-Australia - Newseland, and the establishment of Assyrian Aid Societies in most of the European countries in which there are communities of our immigrant people.

In this context we particularly mention the important role and support provided by the Assyrian National Society in the State of Illinois in recent years; the Assyrian Federation in supporting some of the projects in the previous periods; the Chaldean Federation of America for some recent projects; the Assyrian School friends in Denmark; Father Horst Obercampf from Stuttgart, Germany in supporting many projects, as well as supporting the Women Union and the ChaldoAssyrian Student and Youth Union, through the help of the Lutheran Church and the Society of Ttor B'abdien which he presides; and the Diakonia organization which had its great role in supporting our growth program in the plain of Nineveh in the summer of 2003 after the political change in Iraq.

Our Society has implemented many projects since its establishment in 1991 in cooperation with working organizations in the area, including Save the Children, and other projects with other charity organizations in European countries in coordination with our sister societies in those countries, like the MIVA Charity Society in Austria. In 2005 we received a special fund from Embassy of France in Baghdad for our relief programs.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, we say: although the projects already implemented by our society are very important, particularly in the period of the imposed sanctions on Iraq, and the relieving of the misery of our people; the importance of helping the people of left and ruined villages return to there lands and villages and live in them; still this role remains limited comparing to the real and true needs of our people, and what was possible in its time. Remains the self-factor and the available potentialities were the decisive agents in this respect. And the self-factor of the net of the general relations of our national institutes in the sanctuaries, played its important role in determining the maintenance of cooperation and communication with the humanitarian international organizations with its great capability to gain their agreement and cooperation in implementation of projects for the interests and needs of our people, as the case is in our region and other regions of the world.

We all hope and pray that the work of all good and faithful sons of our people in these times of freedom and opportunity will continue the reconstruction and progress of our beloved Homeland.