If it the specifics help, the soldier was in the Anglo Indian Force attached to the 7th Hussars 4th Cavalry Signal Brigade.
I'm wondering around several subquestions:
- How might socializing have happened between these two groups and how was it looked upon by both Assyrian Iraqis and the British military?
- Obviously WWII was going on but from my reading that period was fairly peaceful in Iraq. What strategic reason might they have been stationed there and was it more to do with WWII or protecting British oil interest (or something else)?
- Would there have likely been any mixing, socially or otherwise, with the Assyrian / Iraq Levies at RAF Habbaniya?
- Are there any books or resources I could use to find out more about the political and social context of WWII-era Iraq, the Levies and British military presence?
Thanks for any insight into any of these questions!
One aspect of this that might explain how such a marriage came about is that Syriac Christians (often referred to collectively as Assyrians) have analogous churches in India, specifically on the Malabar coast.
The various divisions of Syriac Christianity are complicated, but in Iraq you'd find followers of Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Syriac Catholic Church. In India, the Saint Thomas Christians are similarly divided into similar branches, and they still use Syriac as a liturgical language, use the same rites and recognise the Middle Eastern Patriarchs as their spiritual heads. (I'm leaving out how by the 1940s some St Thomas Christians further split from the original churches and created their own independent purely Indian churches.)
Looking up Habbaniya, it's close to Baghdad, so in a region with a significant number of Christians, though not nearly as many as would have been found in the north of the country. If you can determine the religion of the soldier in question - or at least their name and place of birth - it would help narrow down the likelihood that this was the means through which they would have come into contact.