Jilu

The area was traditionally divided into Greater and Lesser Jīlū, and Ishtāzin – each with its own Malik, and consisting of a number of Assyrian villages.

In the summer of 1915, during the Assyrian genocide, Jīlū was surrounded and attacked by Turkish troops and neighboring Kurdish tribes under the leadership of Agha Sūtū of Oramar.

After a brief struggle to maintain their positions, the Assyrian citizens of Jīlū were forced to flee to Salmas in Iran along with other refugees from the Hakkari highlands.

Today their descendants live all over the world including Iraq, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe.

In Syria's al-Hasakah Governorate there are two villages, Tel-Gorān and Abū-Tīnā, established in 1935 by Jīlū refugees from Iraq on the banks of the Khabur River.

The highest peak in the Cilo-Sat range is Toura Jelu (also known as Cilo dağı, maximum elevation 4,168 m), from the summit of which one can see as far as the city of Mosul in Iraq.

[1] Not much is known about Jīlū's pre-Christian history due to its inaccessibility and instability, restricting any form of fieldwork, though prehistoric rock carvings have been found in the Gevaruk valley near Sāţ and on the Tirisin Plateau.

[3] A hitherto unpublished text of the Acts of St. Mammes of Caesarea, who lived in the 3rd century AD, also credits him with having traveled to the village of Oramar (modern-day Dağlıca) where he built a church, known today as El Ahmar Kilisesi.

Afterwards, St. 'Azīzā - reputedly a disciple of Mar Awgin - is credited with having arrived in Jīlū during the 4th century AD, establishing a monastery in the village of Zêrīnī.

At the synod of Catholicos Mār Isaac in 410 AD Beth-Bghāsh, located in the Jīlū village of Bé-Baghshé, was confirmed as a suffragan diocese of the ecclesiastical province of Adiabene.

Evidence for this appears in the inclusion of Jīlū in the title of the metropolitan of Salamas around 1552, and the copying of a manuscript in the village of Naze north of Urmia in 1563 by the priest Paul of Oramar.

Those of Zêrīnī found the church of St. 'Azīzā in ruins and, after rebuilding it, they acquired a text of the saint's legend from the town of Bakhdida in the Nineveh Plains.

[8] Since the 16th century, and probably even earlier, the village of Mātā d-ʿUmrā d-Mār Zayʿā was the seat of a metropolitan bishop of the Church of the East.

The diocese of this metropolitan bishop included the Hakkari districts of Jīlū, Baz, Tkhuma, Chāl (modern-day Çukurca), Ţāl, and Rékān.

It is during this period that a new line of bishops belonging to the same clan as the metropolitans of Jīlū, Bé-Yagmālā, was established at the village of Gāgawran (modern-day Aksu) in the nearby Gāwār plain.

[10] Nineteenth-century bishop Mār Yawsip Sargīs was described by Sir Austen Henry Layard, who met him at the village of Nahrā in late August 1849, as "... a young man of lofty stature and handsome countenance..." and likened his look to that of a hunter or warrior.

[11] In 1891 he was visited by British explorer and writer Isabella Bird, who described him as "a magnificent-looking man with a superb gray beard, the beau-ideal of an Oriental ecclesiastic.

From 1921 onward his see was fixed at the village of Khirshéniyah, immediately to the northwest of Alqosh in the Dohuk Governorate, where a small church was built dedicated to St. Zayʿā.

After the Iraqi revolution in 1958, a new Cathedral dedicated to St. Zayʿā was built at Karrādat Maryam, with large contributions in money and in kind from Jīlū entrepreneurs Lira and Supar.

This dedication was marked by the attendance of high-profile officials, among them the new Iraqi president Abd al-Karim Qasim, as well as other religious leaders.

A new cathedral was built there and dedicated in 1986, forming the only parish of the "diocese of Baghdad" to which the current bishop from this line, Mar Yawsip Sargis, was assigned.

It narrates that a man named Mandū, from the clan of "Nebuchadnezzar," for some unknown reason set out from the city of Āthor (Mosul), traveling in the company of his four brothers: Bārut, Yôsip, Bākus and Issé.

The same tradition recounts that during the reign of one of the Maliks, the Mar Shim'on (Catholicos-Patriarch of the Church of the East) fled from Āthor (Mosul) and sought refuge in Alqosh.

The Persians then came and conquered the area and took Mār Shim'on to Persia, permitting him to live in the town of Ushnū, where he settled as a refugee and built a large cathedral.

During the massacres of Badr Khan the Kurds attacked, plundered, killed and stole their cattle, but Malik Wardā did not interfere to defend the Assyrian tribes.

Malik Khālil complained to the Ottoman government, later taking 400 strongmen from his tribe and 40 Turkish soldiers to attack the Kurdish chief of Oramar.

[14] Lalayan (Assyrians of the Van District, 1914), also recounts the oral legend concerning the origins and history of the Maliks of Lesser Jīlū.

One of the Maliks made strong kinship ties with one of the well-known families of Ţelānā by giving his daughter in marriage to one of their sons.