Actually Nineveh still exists, but its known as Mosul.
Are you sure about that? There is the fact that Mosul is the capital of the Nineveh
governate, but I hadn't heard that Mosul is Nineveh renamed. The Assyrians/Syriacs seem to just call it Mosul in their own language, if this lovely song by Iranian Assyrian legend Evin Aghassi is anything to go by:
It begins: "b'leleh ainee cheemelee, Mosul o Arbil khizyelee matwateh d'Atourayeh...", which loosely translated means "In the night, I close my eyes and see Mosul and Arbil, villages of the Assyrians..." (Aside: the song subsequently mentions other locations such as Alqosh and Kirkuk; Kirkuk is an interesting one, because as far as I can tell, modern Kirkuk is not really known for being heavily populated with Assyrians, though it was within the region known in ancient Syriac sources as Beth Garmai, which was obviously full of Assyrians/Syriacs as basically all of what is now Iraq was if we go back far enough, while Alqosh is of course ground zero for the creation of the Chaldean Catholic Church, whose members often prefer the ethnic designation "Chaldean"/Kaldaya to Assyrian or Syriac).
The city and the surrounding plains are home to a substantial number of Iraq’s Christian population, which is why when ISIS took the city in 2014 it was such a disaster for Christianity in the Middle East.
Indeed. I remember at the time there was a meme-type photo being shared online among the Christians I know that stated that when ISIS took Mosul in 2014, it marked the first time in over
1,600 years that church bells had not run out in the city to announce the weekly celebration of the liturgy. People who have no connection to the region often don't realize how incredibly ancient Christianity is in this area of the Middle East in particular. The Assyrians/Syriacs are often credited with being the "first Christians", and while that is debatable insofar as it can be claimed that the first converts would've been ethnic Jews (though still Aramaic-speaking, as the Jews of the Holy Land had switched to speaking that language as their native language some centuries before the incarnation of our Lord), it's not really debatable in the sense that the people of that ethnic group were more or less completely Christianized by the fourth century AD, while other early Christian people such as the Copts had enough who remained in the old belief system that the last dated graffiti in the Ancient Egyptian writing system (which was by a certain point a distinctive mark of paganism, as the Coptic Christians did not use it, and there are actually treatises written in Coptic of considerable antiquity stating so outright, and discouraging the learning or use of it among Christians on account of its ties to the pre-Christian religion of Egypt) post-dates Theodosius' closure of the temples by a few years, and Justinian's closure of the specific temple it was found in (at Philae) by several more decades. There's also the fact that laws were passed in the wake of the Theodosian decrees that criminalized the disturbing of pagan altars or the harassing of known pagans by Christians on account of the pagans' religious practice (IIRC, Ariel G. Lopez's short 2013 academic book
Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty goes into the political environment surrounding Christian-Pagan relations in the wake of the closure of the temples, if anyone is curious; the violence of that time is a large part of the legend -- or, as I believe Lopez proves it to be, the myth -- surrounding St. Shenouda himself, which is itself why he is often reviled in older-yet-still-modern western writings on him, such as in the rather unfortunate introduction to the most popular English translation of his
Vita by his disciple St. Besa/Abba Wisa, published by Cistersian Publications in 1983).
Thankfully they are gone, but that was a genocidal nightmare. The Yazidis of Sinjar got the worst of it however, poor people, kyrie eleison.
Indeed they did. Lord have mercy. May they, the Christians, the Mandaeans, and the other religious minorities of Iraq find peace and security, as that is what the entire society needs (it's just that the violence hits the minorities especially hard, for obvious reasons related to demographics and different rates of emigration as a result of said violence and instability).
The Oriental Orthodox churches (Syriac Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Ethiopian Orthodox, Eritrean Orthodox, Indian Orthodox) and the Assyrian Church of the East (and the closely related Ancient Church of the East) commemorate this with an annual three day total fast on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday following what in the West we know as Septuagesima, as my Coptic friend
@dzheremi will confirm.
Yes. We usually refer to this in English in the Coptic Orthodox Church as "Jonah's Fast" or "Nineveh's Fast" (as
here), while I believe the Syriacs and related peoples of all churches (e.g., Nestorians, Syro-Malabar Indians, Chaldeans, etc.) refer to it in English as "The Rogation of the Ninevites" (as
here), because they're fancier and better at English than we are.
Urmia on the other hand, was destroyed, but the tribe of Assyrians from that city still exists.
I'm not sure how/if it relates to ancient Urmia, but there's still the city of Urmia in Iran, which is the most populous city in the West Azerbaijan province in that country, and the tenth largest city in Iran overall.
