Armota

Armota (Syriac: ܐܪܡܥܘܛܐ; Kurdish: Harmota) is an Assyrian village that is outside the town of Koy Sinjaq in the Iraqi governorate of Arbil. It is a two-hour drive from Sulaimaniyah. The village is a remote farming hamlet within a rural portion of northern Iraq that was declared a Kurdish-controlled zone after the Persian Gulf War. A 4th century monastery sits on a hillside overlooking Armota. It has been built and destroyed many times. Most recently, Saddam Hussein's soldiers used dynamite to blow it up in 1988. The monastery's destruction was part of a broad scorched-earth campaign targeting non-Arabs, dubbed the Anfal campaign.