Assyrian exile dreams of past glory

He is one of the exiled leaders of ancient Iraq, a man with a castle but no country, at least not yet. He is an Assyrian, which is another way of saying he has a long memory.

Sargon Dadesho has not forgotten that a decade ago Saddam Hussain's regime sent a hit man to a little farm town along California's Highway 99 to shoot him between the eyes, a plot the FBI managed to foil. He has not forgotten the endless list of conquerors and betrayers of the Assyrian tribe, one of the world's oldest civilisations, vanquished in 612 BC and since dispersed around the globe for more than two millennia.

His castle, turrets and all, is the ethnic group's cultural centre, modelled after the historic Assyrian capital of Nineveh. For Dadesho, who works here day and night, it doubles as a headquarters for an Assyrian nation-in-waiting. Past the big hall where they're holding Wednesday night's bingo game, Dadesho plots his sweet revenge, which includes returning to Iraq to reclaim a remnant of the Assyrian empire, vanished from modern-day maps.

Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, Dadesho and his team beam news and entertainment programmes from inside the castle to fellow Assyrians and Arabs in the Middle East, Europe, Canada, Mexico, as well as in Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit. KBSV-TV Channel 23, or "Assyria Sat", is believed to be the only live, non-governmental broadcast that bounces via satellite from America to the deserts and hills of Iraq.

How many Iraqis actually can receive the signal – and Dadesho's call to rise up and overthrow Saddam – is anyone's guess. But in these heady days when the thought of a new Assyria seems like more than a mere dream, it hardly seems to matter whether the audience is one or a million.

With Saddam toppled, he believes it would open up all sorts of possibilities for a people that go back 6,753 years. "We are the indigenous people of Iraq," says 53-year-old Dadesho, whose first name, Sargon, means "King of Light" in the Aramaic language that Jesus Christ spoke. "Who, if not the Assyrians, deserves an autonomous region within a new Iraq?

"It's a dream, I know. But after 2,500 years of waiting patiently for our nation's return, the dream now seems possible."

He is a small man, no more than 5-foot-6, with a meticulous moustache and thinning hair he dyes a shade red. With his dark, brooding eyes, he looks a little like Omar Sharif. Get him started on the subject of the Assyrians, though, and his cultural pride overflows, more like Papa Gus in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

"We invented the first alphabet and the first calendar … before the Greeks, before the Persians and the Romans and the Egyptians and the Jews and the Armenians, there were the Assyrians. We are before everybody. We are the first empire of the world."

Dadesho (pronounced Dah-DEE-shoo) is an acknowledged leader of the American exiles, struggling to preserve the legacy of ancient Mesopotamia, the land of two rivers that the Assyrians call Bet Nahrain.

The son of a grocer born in the central Iraqi town of Habbanya, he fled his homeland in 1965 and landed in this corner of Stanislaus County, where 15,000 other Assyrian exiles came to work the land. He became president of the Assyrian National Congress, the largest umbrella group representing exiles worldwide, and a founder of the Bet-Nahrain Democratic Party, which, members say, still controls a small militia in northern Iraq.

Still, Dadesho might have escaped the notice of the Iraqi regime were it not for a one-hour weekly television programme that he produced in the mid-1980s, mixing Assyrian news and songs with caricatures of Saddam. The videos of Dadesho championing an autonomous state for Assyrians made their way from Ceres to Beirut to Baghdad. Soon, he found himself on Saddam's hit list of dissidents living on foreign soil.

The assigned killer was a local Assyrian with a lovely voice, who had recorded a few songs in Dadesho's studio and painted houses on the side.

In winter 1990, the FBI recorded a telephone conversation between the handyman and the first secretary of the Iraqi Mission to the UN. For $50,000, on direct orders from Saddam's cousin, he was to shoot Dadesho "between the eyes".

In published reports at the time, the FBI acknowledged that it made a series of blunders. If not for the hit man trying to recruit a driver who turned out to be Dadesho's cousin, the plot might have succeeded.

In the end, the hired gunman left the country and Dadesho eventually won a $2.5 million federal court judgment against the Iraqi government for its role in the plot.

But he is far too busy to fret about when he might receive his share of the nation's frozen assets.

© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service