Deraluk

The name of the town is derived from "deira" ("monastery/church" in Syriac) and "Luqa" ("Luke" in Syriac), and thus Deraluk translates to "monastery or church of Saint Luke".[4]

In 1920, Deraluk was settled by Assyrians of the Baz clan after their expulsion from the region of Hakkari in Turkey.[4] It was named after a ruined monastery of Saint Luke in the vicinity.[4] Prior to the Simele massacre in 1933, Deraluk was inhabited by 130 Assyrians, many of whom were forced to flee the violence and settled along the River Khabur in Syria.[4]

Deraluk was made a mujamma (collective town) by the Iraqi government in 1978 and settled by displaced Assyrians from Nerwa Rekan along the Iraq–Turkey border.[4] Fortry-five houses were constructed for the thirty households that came from Qārō, five households from Lower Nerwa, five households from Derigni, and five households from Wela.[4] In the following year, a church of Mar Khnana was constructed.[4]

It was used as a mujamma again in 1987–1988 during the Anfal campaign.[6] At Deraluk, Kurdistan Democratic Party guerrillas seized documents pertaining to the use of biological and chemical weapons by the Iraqi Armed Forces during the Iran-Iraq War in January 1988.[7]

On 5 December 2011, amidst the 2011 Duhok riots, alcohol shops were targeted by rioters and four were set alight and two others were ransacked.[8] In 2012, an estimated 525 Assyrians inhabited Deraluk.[9] Humanitarian aid was delivered to 72 displaced families from Mosul and the Nineveh Plains by the Assyrian Aid Society in January 2015.[10] As of 2021, 120 Assyrians with 45 families, all of whom are adherents of the Assyrian Church of the East, reside at Deraluk.[11]

• Donabed, Sargon George (2015). Reforging a Forgotten History: Iraq and the Assyrians in the Twentieth Century. Edinburgh University Press.
• Hiro, Dilip (1991). The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict. Psychology Press.