Most Assyrians arrived in Canada due to both ethnic persecution and religious persecution , mainly from their ancient ancestral Assyrian homeland in northern Iraq , southeast Turkey , northeast Syria and northwest Iran . The migration to Canada may be broken up into a number of distinct periods : early settlement and the subsequent waves of migration sparked by the Assyrian genocide in present-day Turkey and Iran , the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and , more recently , the Iraq War and Syrian Civil War . The last 2006 Census Canada counted 8,650 The first period of known mass-migration came just after the Assyrian Genocide in the dying days of the Turkish Ottoman Empire . The second and perhaps largest wave of migration into came during the Iran – Iraq War . Under the shadow of war , Saddam Hussein 's al-Anfal Campaign constituted a major force for migration for Iraq 's Assyrian population
Assyrian genocide
Assyrian genocide
Assyrian-Canadians