Armota

Armota (Syriac: ܐܪܡܥܘܛܐ‎; Kurdish: Harmota‎) is an Assyrian village that is outside the town of Koy Sinjaq in the Iraqi governorate of Arbil. It is a two-hour drive from Sulaimaniyah.

The village is a remote farming hamlet within a rural portion of northern Iraq that was declared a Kurdish-controlled zone after the Persian Gulf War.

A 4th century Assyrian monastery sits on a hillside overlooking Armota. It has been built and destroyed many times. Most recently, Saddam Hussein's soldiers used dynamite to blow it up in 1988. The monastery's destruction was part of a broad scorched-earth campaign targeting non-Arabs, dubbed the Anfal campaign.