Zakho

Due to its strategic location and the abundance of job opportunities, Zakho has attracted many workers and job seekers from different parts of Iraq and even from Syria and Turkey. Trade with Turkey is now the major element of the economy.[11] Oil drilling began in 2005.[12]

In 1991, Zakho was the centre of the haven established by the British and the Americans in Operation Provide Comfort to protect the Iraqi Kurds from being massacred by Saddam Hussein when he responded brutally to the Kurdish rebellion. Most of the inhabitants of the city had fled to the mountains. When the American forces arrived, they described the town as a ghost city.[13]

On 27 February 1995, a car bomb killed over 50 people. When the U.S. Army closed its military base in Zakho in 1996, they evacuated several thousand Kurds who had connections to the base and who feared reprisals. Many of them were given asylum in the USA. According to David McDowall, this constituted a sudden brain drain, with Zakho losing many of its most educated citizens.[14]

In 2008 it was reported that the Turkish Army maintained four bases in Zakho District, under an agreement concluded with the Iraqi Government in the 1990s.[15]

The 2011 Dohuk riots, which targeted Assyrian-owned businesses, were sparked by Muslim clerics in the town.[16]

Assyrians have lived in Zakho since at least the 5th century, with some Assyrian bishops being mentioned from the fifth to the seventh century, which indicates its long history (Chabot, "Synodicon orientale", 676). Additionally, the city was the center of a large Chaldean Catholic diocese up until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was divided into three dioceses: Amadia, Zakho, and Akra-Zehbar. The historic diocese of Zakho corresponded with the ancient Diocese of Malta, formerly a suffragan of Arbela, and it had many Chaldean Catholic villages and parishes in the mountains to the north of the city.[17] However, the diocese was recently merged (or in religious terminology, suppressed) back into the Chaldean Catholic Eparchy of Amadiya in 2013 due to becoming vacant after the death of its bishop in 2010. Prior to merging with Amadiya, the diocese comprised 3500 Assyrian Catholics, ten resident priests, fifteen parishes or stations, twenty churches and chapels, and one primary school. In regards to the city of Zakho itself, there is a large Assyrian population. The Assyrians of Zakho are primarily Chaldean Catholic Christians and have a large church which lies in the center of the city and which once functioned as the Cathedral of the Diocese,[18] in addition to a smaller church as well.[19]

The Armenians of Zakho established their community after the Armenian Genocide, with the first Armenian church in the city being established in 1923.[20] Some of the Armenians of Zakho left in 1932 to found the village of Avzrog Miri in the plains west of the city of Simele.[21]

Zakho was formerly known for its synagogues and large, ancient Jewish community and was known as "The Jerusalem of Kurdistan."[22] The banks of the nearby Khabur River are mentioned in the Bible as one of the places to which the Israelites were exiled (1 Chronicles, 5:26,[23] 2 Kings 17:6, 2 Kings 18:11).

The Jews spoke the Aramaic of their ancestors and were also fluent in Kurmanji, the language spoken by non-Jewish Kurds.[24]

Kurdish society was primarily a tribal one. Jews of Zakho bore arms like Kurdish Muslims.[25] There was an attack on the Jews in 1891, when one of the synagogues was burnt down. The troubles intensified in 1892.

Most of the Jews relocated to Israel in the 1950s.[26] While the Jews of Zakho were among the least literate in the disapora, they had a unique and rich oral tradition, known for its legends, epics and ballads, whose heroes came from both Jewish and Muslim traditions.[27]