Sayfo

Context

“Historians record that the first massacre of Assyrians in modern times took place in the 1840s, in northern Mesopotamia. The Ottoman Turks allowed the Assyrians to be massacred by the Kurdish chieftain Badr Khan Bey, who summoned the surrounding Muslim population to a ‘‘Holy War,’’ killing 10,000 Assyrians, enslaving many women and children, and ravaging villages. Turkish soldiers and their Kurdish allies murdered the Christians of half a dozen Mesopotamian Christian villages; the surviving women and children were kidnapped and enslaved. Slavery was a common fate of Ottoman Christians in the nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II had created an irregular force of pro-government Kurdish horsemen called the Hamidiye. The Hamidiye massacred and made refugees of the restive Assyrian and Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, as the contemporary Arab Janjaweed in Sudan have done to the indigenous Africans in Darfur. Famine, ravaged towns and villages, and extermination of the Christian population were the legacies of the Hamidiye horsemen. The Kurds organized into the Hamidiye ‘‘received assurances that they [would] not be called to answer before the tribunals for any acts of oppression committed against Christians.”
(Native Christians Massacred: Ottoman Genocide of Assyrians during WWI, pg 329)

“A key source of evidentiary support for the existence of the Armenian and Assyrian genocides is the famous ‘‘Blue Book’’ compiled by Viscount James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee in 1916, commonly known by the title under which it was released by the British Foreign Office: The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915–16. The British government commissioned Viscount Bryce and Mr. Toynbee, a young historian affiliated with Oxford University, to prepare a ‘‘general narrative’’ of the ‘‘accounts of massacres and deportations of the Christian population of Asiatic Turkey,’’ accounts that had increased in ‘‘number and fullness of detail.’’ Most of these accounts were communicated to Toynbee via the United States, then professing neutrality in World War I, from citizens of neutral countries, often American missionaries. More than three dozen of the reports in the Blue Book constituted official State Department records. The original title of this compilation of American and European eyewitness testimony and documentation of the Armenian and Assyrian genocides was ‘‘Papers and Documents on the Treatment of Armenians and Assyrian Christians by the Turks, 1915–1916, in the Ottoman Empire and North-West Persia.’’60 Bryce, something of a ‘‘champion of the Ottoman Armenians,’’61 had removed the reference to Assyrian Christians in the title of the Blue Book prior to its publication by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.62 The deletion of the accounts of the Assyrian massacres from the French translation of the Blue Book presented to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919–1920 further distorted the historical record”(Native Christians Massacred: Ottoman Genocide of Assyrians during WWI, pg 331)
“The Blue Book documents how, under Turkish occupation and ‘‘urged on and followed by Turkish officers and troops,’’ the Kurds and other Muslims in and around Urmia ‘‘set to work robbing and looting, killing men and women and outraging the women.’’ Turkish forces directly massacred the Christian population and failed to prevent many other massacres, leading to the murder of over one thousand people—men, women, and children; the outraging of hundreds of women and girls of every age—from eight or nine years old to old age; the total robbing of about five-sixths of the Christian population; and the total destruction of about the same proportion of their houses. Another eyewitness account recorded in the Blue Book states that in the largest ‘‘Syrian’’ or Assyrian village in Urmia, all the men were hauled over to the cemetery to be murdered, while the ‘‘women and girls [were] treated barbarously,’’ and sixty men were removed from the French Mission and summarily shot. In the Catholic Mission in Urmia, dozens of Christians, including an Episcopal bishop, ‘‘were bound together one night, taken to Gagain mountain and there shot down.’’ A minister affiliated with the Church of England’s mission to Assyrians reported that ‘‘those who died from the slaughter and raiding of villages numbered 6,000.’’ Another report estimated 8,500 deaths in and around Urmia in five months in 1915 Many other Assyrians in Persia suffered a similar fate under the Turks. In Salmas, a town in Persia inhabited by more than 2,000 Assyrians, the Turks gathered together and massacred about 800 Christians, mostly women and older men, prior to the Turkish withdrawal from the area. Some Christian men ‘‘were tied with their heads sticking through the rungs of a ladder and decapitated, others hacked to pieces or mutilated before death.’’ In Diliman, Persia, ‘‘all the males above twelve years of age … were taken to two neighboring villages, tortured and shot.’ In Gulpashan, Persia, dozens of men were tied together to be shot outside the village, their ‘‘wives and daughters distributed among the Turks, Kurds, and Persian Mohammedans.’’ About one-fifth of the 30,000 Assyrians living in Urmia and its surrounding villages died, and their villages were the most part torched, with their cultural property, their churches, reduced to ruin. These accounts from the Blue Book are corroborated by American diplomatic files, which document that During the period of Turkish occupation [of northwestern Persia], from January 1st to May 24th [1915], all the Christian villages and all the Christians living in Moslem villages were completely looted, men were killed, women were violated and some two hundred girls taken away captive …. thousands died of disease”(Native Christians Massacred: Ottoman genocide of Assyrians during WWI, pg 332)
“The Washington Post reported in March 1915 that ‘‘Turkish regular troops and Kurds are persecuting and massacring Assyrian Christians.’’ According to a letter from an American eyewitness, many of the thousands of Christian refugees in Urmia were ‘‘murdered in cold blood and with cruel tortures by the Kurds,’’ with ‘‘women and children carried off ’’ into slavery.158 In the village of Diza, south of Urmia, Kurdish forces had buried 3,000 Christians up to their chins, riding on horseback over and crushing the skulls of those who survived the first day of this ordeal.159 The Post also described how rampaging Kurds, spurred on by the Ottoman Empire’s declaration of jihad the previous winter, exterminated the local population of Christians unable to flee because they were too old, sick, or incapacitated.160 The Kurds carried flags proclaiming the ‘‘holy war.’’ As thousands of Assyrians fled Urmia through the snowy fields to avoid bands of Kurds on the roads, the men were massacred and many girls as young as seven or eight years old ‘‘were openly assaulted.’’ In Gulpashan, Kurds tore sixty-five Christian men out of missions, to which they had fled for safety, and hanged them.”(Native Christians Massacred: Ottoman genocide of Assyrians during WWI, pg 338)
https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/2/754/5817142?login=false
To date, the Armenian genocide has received much attention within the academic circles. Even though a lot needs to be learned, numerous studies have unveiled different facets of the genocide and its repercussions. However, the same could not be said about the Assyrian genocide, or the Sayfo, as referred to by Assyrians. Although the study of the Sayfo remains in its infancy, recent scholarship has been attempting to reconstruct this important phase of history. The most important book that has been published in recent years was by historian David Gaunt. The book, titled Massacres, Resistance, and Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (2006), dealt with the fate of Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syrian Christians during World War I. By concentrating on the regions of Urmia, Hakkari, and Diyarbekir, the book aimed at reconstructing the genocide of the Assyrian communities of these regions. David Gaunt, Naures Atto, and Soner O. Barthoma’s edited collection Let Them Not Return: Sayfo—the Genocide against the Assyrian, Syriac and Chaldean Christians in the Ottoman Empire is a welcome addition to the study of the Sayfo. What is unique about this book is that it does not only concentrate on the actual genocide but discusses the impact of the genocide on the Assyrian communities, the ecclesiastic order, literature, denial, as well as international politics. Thus, the strength of the book lies in its multidisciplinary aspect.