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Assyrian genocide

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The Assyrian genocide, also known as the Sayfo, was a genocide led by the Ottoman Empire with the help of allied Kurdish tribes, where 250,000 to 300,000 Assyrians were killed.

Assyrian Genocide
Assyrian Genocide
An Assyrian mother and her child, fleeing the genocide.
Location Ottoman Empire
Date 1914-1918
Attack type Genocide, death marches, forced Islamization
Deaths 250,000-300,000
Perpetrator(s) Ottoman Empire, Kurdish forces

Etymology

The Assyrians call the Assyrian genocide Sayfo[a], the Aramaic word for sword.

Background

History of Assyrians

Ancient times

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

Ottoman Empire

The Ottomans oppressed the Assyrians, took away their independence and forced them to assimilate to their empire. Those who have survived keep their common unity, especially in their deep Christian faith. Many Assyrians were considered "impure" by the Ottoman Turks and were massacred for refusing to renounce Christianity to become Muslims.

Assyrians lost their homes and possessions to the Red Sultan, Abdul Hamid II. Even before the genocide, they had been persecuted and forced to pay high taxes. Most killings happened between 1915 and 1917.[1][2]

Assyrian experiences from the Assyrian Voice

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. [3]

Events

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 that were inhabited by Ottoman Greeks. Assyrians lived mostly in the southern and the 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.
Shortly after the first Russian retreat from Persie, and before the arrival of Mar Shimon's Army, the Persian Assyriahs began to flee to the protection of the American and the French flags in Urmia. But they were intercepted by the Moslems, who killed hundreds of them and carried their women captives.

The genocide was committed against Assyrians within the Ottoman Empire during the First World War by the Young Turks.[4] The Assyrian population of northern Mesopotamia included the Van, Siirt, Tur Abdin and Hakkari regions of present-day southeastern Turkey and the Urmia region of present-day northwestern Iran.

The Assyrians were forcibly relocated and massacred by Ottoman and Kurdish forces between 1914 and 1920 under the regime of the Young Turks. Under leadership of Djevdet Bey, the Ottoman governor, at least 55,000 Assyrian Christians were martyred. He is considered responsible for the massacres of Armenians and Assyrians in and around Vilayet of Van province.[1][2]

Death toll

Scholars have placed the number of Assyrian victims from 250,000[5][6][7][8][9] to 300,000.[10][11]

Concurrent genocides

The Assyrian genocide took place in the same context and period as the Armenian and Greek genocides.[1][2] But unlike the last two, no official national or international recognition of the Assyrian genocide has been made, and many accounts discuss the Assyrian genocide only as a part of the larger events subsumed under the Armenian genocide.[1][2]

Assyrian Genocide Media

  • Jilu Assyrians crossing the Asadabad Pass towards Baqubah, 1918

  • The percent of the prewar population which was Assyrian, presented by the Assyro-Chaldean delegation to the 1919 Paris peace conference.*     More than 50%*     30–40%*     20–30%*     10–20%*     5–10%

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

  • Assyrian warriors from Tergawar, a Persian border district

  • A 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.

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

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

  • A map of the Sayfo in Azerbaijan, with destroyed Christian towns, and refugee escape routes

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

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

Related pages

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Aramaic: ܣܲܝܦܵܐ

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 *Travis, Hannibal. Forgotten Genocides (2011). doi:10.9783/9780812204384-009. Retrieved February 2, 2025.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 *Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), p. 169.
  3. ↑ Joseph Naayem, Shall This Nation Die?
  4. ↑ Aprim, Frederick A. Syriacs: The Continuous Saga, page 40
  5. ↑ Bloxham, Donald. Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (in en) (2011-03-10)Cambridge University Press. p. 99. ISBN 978-1-139-50129-3.
  6. ↑ Morris, Benny. The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 (in en) (2019-04-24)Harvard University Press. p. 488. ISBN 978-0-674-91645-6.
  7. ↑ Wyrtzen, Jonathan. Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East (in en) (2022-08-09)Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-54657-7.
  8. ↑ Shattuck, Gardiner H.. Christian Homeland: Episcopalians and the Middle East, 1820-1958 (in en) (2022-12-09)Oxford University Press. p. 86. ISBN 978-0-19-766503-9.
  9. ↑ Benjamen, Alda. Assyrians in Modern Iraq: Negotiating Political and Cultural Space (in en) (2022-02-03)Cambridge University Press. p. 14. ISBN 978-1-108-83879-5.
  10. ↑ Waal, Thomas De. The Caucasus: An Introduction (in en) (2019)Oxford University Press. p. 55. ISBN 978-0-19-068308-5.
  11. ↑ Robson, Laura. States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (in en) (2017-04-18)Univ of California Press. p. 35. ISBN 978-0-520-29215-4.
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