Contact Admin. The Faith House, 22 Buckingham St: THE following pages have been written with the twofold object of bringing to the notice of the British and American public the travails, of a small Christian nation, which unreservedly threw in its lot with the Entente cause during the late World War, and suffered grievously in consequence; and, secondly, to emphasise what Great Britain, practically unaided, has taken upon her own already greatly overburdened shoulders to ameliorate the sad lot of these fugitives from their former homes.
The writer, as late Commandant of this huge Refugee Camp, almost from its inception, should obviously be in a position to discuss with some knowledge of the facts the matter presented in this little book; and if by so doing he succeeds in raising the interest of others in the fate of the obscure Assyrian nation he will feel that his task has not been in vain.
The little town of Baqubah is situated on the left bank of the river Diala, which, rising in the Persian uplands, flows into the Tigris a few miles south of Baghdad. The town is some 33 miles NNE of Baghdad, and is on the direct caravan route between that city and Kirmanshah, Hamadan, and other important Persian centres.
The brick and mud houses and huts of Baqubah are almost entirely concealed from the right bank of the river--here from to yards wide during the flood season, and confined between high precipitous mud banks by a luxuriant growth of date palms, orange groves, figs and vines, for which this little oasis is noted throughout Mesopotamia.
The metre gauge railway from Baghdad to Kizil Robat and the Persian frontier, which was commenced shortly after the British occupation of Baghdad, in order, to facilitate the operations undertaken against the Turkish forces in those regions, crossed the Diala by means of a lofty, wooden pile bridge after traversing a great easterly loop of the river a mile or a mile and a half down stream of Baqubah.
