Aramean Diaspora in Germany

Initially, a few Arameans came to Germany during the guest worker recruitment program of the 1960s. After the guest worker recruitment program was halted, another large wave of emigration occurred from their ancestral lands in southeastern Turkey, the Tur Abdin region. This took place in the 1980s, when the Arameans were threatened with being caught in the crossfire of the Turkish-Kurdish civil war. Geographically, they were situated between the Turkish military on one side and the Kurdish PKK party, banned in Germany, on the other, which was fighting for an independent Kurdistan. The Tur Abdin (Aramaic: Mountain of the Servants of God), the ancestral homeland of most Arameans and so named because of its numerous churches and monasteries, was to be cleansed of the Arameans. Between 1990 and 1994, 30 Aramean citizens were murdered.