attacked by Kurds again, which impacted Bartella. In 1745, Nader Shah, a Persian, attacked Bartella, killed many men and took many young men, girls and women away. From 1756 to 1758, Bartella experienced great famine, which promoted more travel of the people of the town to purchase their needs. They suffered many robberies and attacks during these travels. In 1789, Jolu Beg bin Bdagh, the Emir of Shikhan, exhausted Bartella of their goods while at war with the Arab Emir Mohammad bin Hasan al-Taa'i. In the 18th century, Catholicism entered the city when Latin and Dominican monks opened a center to offer educational and medical services. In 1778, the Assyrians of Bakhdida were leaning towards Catholicism, which influenced some family members of the Aal Makrooh family in Bartella to convert. In 1780, Father Zakariya Kindo converted along with 40 other families. While there were some quarrels about using the church in Bartella between the Catholic and Orthodox priests in, they came a common understanding and accepted each other's choice of denomination. Today, about one third of the town is Catholic, while the other two-thirds remain Orthodox. Latest events On August 31, 2004, three girls from Bartella were slaughtered while returning home from their work at a hospital in Mosul where they worked. On November 19, 2004, two brothers from Bartella were killed while at work when a mortar shell fell on the shop they worked at in Mosul market. On December 8, 2004, Dr. Ra'ad Augustine Qoryaqos, one of Bartella's notables and a successful surgeon who worked as a professor at the College of Medicine in University of Anbar, was murdered in Ramadi. A group of three terrorists stormed his clinic while he was checking on his patients, shot and left him bleeding. An operation later failed to save his life. Dr. Qoryaqos left behind his wife and two children. On August 10, 2009, a pair of large flatbed trucks packed with bombs exploded simultaneously shortly after dawn, destroying a Shabak village known as Khazna, about east of Mosul and a few kilometres away from Bartella. The blast shattered windows at many homes in Bartella. On March 28, 2013, and during the passion week of Easter, a car bomb parked downtown not far from street of Bartella went off in the early hours of that day killing one local resident. On August 3, 2014, many families from Bartella left the