Bartella (Syriac: ܒܪܛܠܐ;[1] Arabic: برطلّة) is a town that is located in the Nineveh Plains in northern Iraq, about 21 kilometres (13 miles) east of Mosul.

However, the monks at the monastery learned of another encroaching attack and agreed to sign a peace treaty with the Kurds to avoid more bloodshed.

As soon as the Kurds received the gold, they gathered a larger army of 1,500 people and attacked the monastery, causing a crack in its wall.

The cleric went to Mosul and gathered a large crowd by the main mosque, and later marched toward Bartella to destroy it.

[9] In the 18th century, Catholicism entered the city when Latin and Dominican monks opened a center to offer educational and medical services.

While there were some quarrels about using the church in Bartella between the Catholic and Orthodox priests in, they came a common understanding and accepted each other's choice of denomination.

[10] On December 8, 2004, Dr. Ra'ad Augustine Qoryaqos, one of Bartella's notables and a successful surgeon who worked as a professor at the College of Medicine in University of Anbar, was murdered in Ramadi.

[10] On August 10, 2009, a pair of large flatbed trucks packed with bombs exploded simultaneously shortly after dawn, destroying a Shabak village known as Khazna, about 16 km (10 mi) east of Mosul and a few kilometres away from Bartella.

[11] On March 28, 2013, and during the passion week of Easter, a car bomb parked downtown not far from street of Bartella went off in the early hours of that day killing one local resident.

[12] On August 3, 2014, many families from Bartella left the city to Erbil, Ankawa and Shekhan due to attacks by ISIL fighters.

[13] On August 6, 2014, Peshmerga forces guarding the city ordered the remaining residents to leave, and pulled back to Erbil at around 8:30 pm.

On August 8, they burned liquor stores, looted houses and food stores, hung their flags on the church walls, pulled down the crosses and demanded the few remaining Christian locals of either converting to Islam, staying in the city and paying a yearly tax of $200, or facing "death by the sword" if refused to convert or pay.

It's believed that he used to worship pagans, and after converting to Christianity he was killed by his father and was buried in the village of Ba Agre.

That forced Maphrian Gregarious bin al-Ebry to build a temple for the martyr Yohanan in Bartella and was completed in 1285.

On November 23, 1285, the remains of St. Yohanan, monks from Syria, and the 40 martyrs killed by the Persians were moved and reburied in this temple.

[26] The Assyrian population of the town fled, mostly to Erbil, joining thousands of other Iraqi Christians fleeing ISIL terror.

A few days prior to the wedding, the wall above the front of door of the couple's future home is painted with beautiful colors and decorated with various flowers.

The walls of the couple's room are newly painted as well, since they typically became darkened with smoke from the indoor fires used for heat in the winter.