Assyrian Canadians are Canadian citizens of Assyrian ethnicity. According to the 2011 Census there were 10,810 Canadians who claimed Assyrian ancestry.
They are the indigenous pre-Arab and pre-Turkic people of Iraq, south east Turkey and north east Syria, speak dialects of Eastern Aramaic and are Christians, with most following the Assyrian Church of the East, Syriac Orthodox Church, Chaldean Catholic Church, Ancient Church of the East, Assyrian Pentecostal Church and Assyrian Evangelical Church, although some are irriligeous.
History
Most Assyrians arrived in Canada due to both ethnic persecution and religious persecution, mainly from their ancient ancestral homelands in northern Iraq, southeast Turkey, northeast Syria and northwest Iran. The migration to Canada may be broken up into a number of distinct periods: early settlement and the subsequent waves of migration sparked by the Assyrian genocide in present-day Turkey and Iran, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and, more recently, the Iraq War and Syrian Civil War. The last 2006 Census Canada counted 8,650
Assyrians in the country. The first period of known mass-migration came just after the Assyrian Genocide in the dying days of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The second and perhaps largest wave of migration into came during the Iran–Iraq War. Under the shadow of war, Saddam Hussein's al-Anfal Campaign constituted a major force for migration for Iraq's Assyrian population.