The Assyrian capital of Europe is a truck town in Sweden
The unofficial Assyrian capital of Europe is a Swedish truck town forty minutes from Stockholm.
Södertälje first welcomed Assyrian families in the 1960s, not because the Baltic cold looked like home, but because Scania's factory paid. It kept taking them. In 2008, its mayor told the US Congress that a town of 83,000 had taken in more Iraqi refugees than the US and Canada combined. The US admitted 13,823 Iraqi refugees that whole year; Södertälje had absorbed more than 5,000 since the war began.
Today about a quarter of the town is Assyrian or Syriac. Four bishops live there, churches in Arabic and every other tongue that fled. Two football clubs carry the people's names, Syrianska and Assyriska, and play each other in the same city. Journalists call it Sweden's Aleppo; locals call it Mesopotäljie.
They kept the old home. In 2018, 165,000 Iraqis voted from abroad in 21 countries; when parliament tried to annul the diaspora's votes, the supreme court gave them back. In 2005 it was 265,000, 93.6% of everyone registered.
Home is not a place you keep. It is a place you rebuild, and rebuilding works two thousand miles away, in snow, beside a truck factory.