Just wanted to flick in with that this user has been permanently blocked, unfortunately. Even though he had some problems understanding some wikipedia policies, he did actually made some good contributions. This promotional spam you speak of, has developed to some war between Syriacs and Assyrians calling historical figures for Syriac or Assyrian. I'm personally of the opinion that it is correct to call some of them Syriacs, but calling some historical figures like Michael the Syrian for Assyrian (as you can see by the articles history) is just crossing the line (the term Assyrian haven't been used since the fall of the Assyrian empire until the the late of the 19th century).