This diocese, frequently mentioned in Thomas of Marga's Book of Governors, included the districts of Sapsapa (the Navkur plain south of ʿAqra, on the east bank of the Khazir river), Talana and Nahla d'Malka (two valleys around the upper course of the Khazir river), Beth Rustaqa (the Gomel valley) and probably also several villages in the Zibar district.
By the second half of the thirteenth century the names of two villages in the Gomel valley, Tella and Barbelli (Billan), were also included in the title of the diocese.
Most of the villages in the ʿAqra region were still traditionalist at the beginning of the nineteenth century (though the Zibar villages of Arena and Barzane had Catholic communities before the end of the eighteenth century), and determined efforts by the Chaldean church to convert them to Catholicism in the 1830s shook their traditional loyalty, enabling the Qudshanis patriarchate to exercise some influence in the region for a short period.
[1] The incident was notorious, and Badger's contemporary account is to be preferred to an alternative tradition preserved by Tfinkdji, who stated that Eliya was consecrated at Qudshanis in 1829, and that the patriarch's motive was to harass his old enemy, the metropolitan of ʿAmadiya Joseph Audo.
In 1852 Eliya Sefaro was again consecrated for ʿAqra, by the patriarch Joseph VI Audo, and a stable Chaldean diocese in the region was finally established.
According to a contemporary note in a manuscript from the ʿAqra region, Eliya Sefaro died in Herpa two years after his consecration, on 22 September 1854, and was buried in the village.
In 1889 he made his submission to pope Leo XIII, and in 1890 was transferred to the diocese of Mardin by the patriarch Eliya XII ʿAbulyonan.
At the synod of Alqosh in 1894 the newly elected patriarch ʿAbdishoʿ V Khayyat asked to retain Eliya Joseph Khayyat, bishop-designate of ʿAmadiya, as his patriarchal vicar, and the dioceses of ʿAmadiya and ʿAqra were temporarily united under Yaʿqob Yohannan Sahhar, who was responsible for the united diocese from 23 April 1895 until his death in 1909.