Assyrian genocide

Sayfo was a genocide by the Ottoman Empire in which over 300,000 Assyrians were killed during raids.

The Assyrians call it the Sayfo, the Aramaic word for "sword". Many Assyrians were considered unpure by the Turks and were massacred for not giving up Christianity and becoming Muslims. Assyrians lost their homes and possessions to the sultan, Adulhamed the Red. Even before the genocide, they had been persecuted and forced to pay high taxes.

Since ancient times and the conquest by the Babylonians, the Assyrians have not have had their own nation. Their diaspora has spread over to many different countries.

Under the Turks, they were oppressed and forced assimilated to the empires, and many lost their independence. Those who have survived keep their common unity, especially in their deep Christian faith.

Personal experience quoted from the Assyrian Voice

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"One day the Moslems assembled all the children of from six to fifteen years and carried them off to the headquarters of the police. There they led the poor little things to the top of a mountain known as Ras-el Hadjar and cut their throats one by one, throwing their bodies into an abyss."

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Overview of the massacre

Map showing the Armenian (in colours) and Christian (in shadings) population of the eastern Ottoman provinces in the year 1896. In the areas where the share of Christian population was higher than that of the Armenians, the non-Armenian Christian population largely consisted of Assyrians (except in regions inhabited by Ottoman Greeks). Assyrians lived mostly in the southern and southeastern parts of the region

40 Christians dying a day say Assyrian refugees - The Syracuse Herald, 1915.

The Washington Post and other leading newspapers in Western countries reported on the Assyrian Genocide as it unfolded.

An article from The New York Times, March 27, 1915.

The Assyrian genocide (also known as Sayfo or Seyfo) was committed against the Assyrian population of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War by the Young Turks. The Assyrian population of northern Mesopotamia included the Tur Abdin, Hakkari, Van, Siirt regions of present-day southeastern Turkey and the Urmia region of northwestern Iran. They were forcibly relocated and massacred by Ottoman (Turkish) and Kurdish forces between 1914 and 1920 under the regime of the Young Turks. Under leadership of Djevdet Bey, ottoman governor, at least 55 000 Assyrian Christians were martyred. He is considered responsible for the massacres of Armenians and Assyrians in and around Van Scholars have placed the number of Assyrian victims from 300,000 to 750,000.

The Assyrian genocide took place in the same context and time-period as the Armenian and Greek genocides. But unlike these, no official national or international recognition of the Assyrian genocide has been made, and many accounts discuss the Assyrian genocide as a part of the larger events subsumed under the Armenian genocide.

Assyrian Genocide Media

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  Jilu Assyrians crossing the Asadabad Pass towards Baqubah in 1918

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  Assyrians in Several Vilayets and Sanjaks in the Ottoman Empire and Urmia in Persia prior to WW1. Data from the Assyrian delegation to the 1919 peace conference.*  More than 50%*

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  Mata Khtata, a Baz village in Hakkari, c. 1900

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  Assyrian warriors from Tergawar, a Persian border district

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  Map of southeastern Anatolia. Hakkari is the mountains on the center-right of the map, in the triangle roughly north of Amadiya, southeast of the line from Djezire to Khoshab, and west of the Ottoman–Persian border.

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  Oramar, looking northward across the gorge toward the crags of Supa Durig between Jilu and Baz

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  Christians fleeing to the Caucasus after the Russian withdrawal in January 1915

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  Map of the Sayfo in Azerbaijan, with destroyed Christian towns and refugee escape routes

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  1920 painting by Leonardo de Mango of the execution of Chaldeans in the Wadi Wawela gorge

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  Djalila, a Chaldean Catholic woman who survived deportation from Siirt to Aleppo