Assyrian genocide

The Assyrian genocide was a genocide by the Ottoman Empire and Kurdish Tribes in which around 750,000 Assyrians were killed during raids.

The Assyrians call it the Sayfo, the Aramaic word for "sword". Many Assyrians were considered unpure by the Ottoman Turks and were massacred for not giving up 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.

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.

The Ottomans oppressed the Assyrians, forced them to assimilate to their empires, and made them lose their independence. Those who have survived keep their common unity, especially in their deep Christian faith.

Personal experience quoted from 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 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 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.

The genocide 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 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 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 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.