Though inheritors of a long and storied tradition, filled with the light of various philosophies, sciences, and histories, the Assyrians have, all too recently, experienced an unprecedented, modern-day decimation of their lands, history, and culture. The Assyrian genocide is one of the great forgotten tragedies of the human experience—a lingering, festering wound that carries a heavy meaning for the Assyrian-American people.
From the very onset of the first Russian-Persian war between 1804 and 1813, fought between the Russian Empire and the waning Persian Empire, the status of the Christian minorities of the Middle East, then comprising 20% of the population, was compromised. The question by the ruling class of the time became, “Should Russia invade our holdings, who do the minorities, Assyrians, Kurds, Armenians, and Greeks, support?” With the defeat and consequent humiliation of the Qajar dynasty in Persia, this question evolved into a subconscious desire to gradually eliminate this ancient, culturally rich, and increasingly vulnerable component of the Middle East. Today, Christians comprise less than 1% of the population: an astonishing fact, considering they were once not only a majority, but that the birthplace of Christianity was that very region.
Such cruel sentiments and bigotry only lingered in the collective psyche of the Middle East, so that, come the next century, the powder keg that was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, resulted in the fallout of the Great War. Even though the First World War didn’t officially begin until July 28, 1914, by June, news had already reached the Assyrian Patriarch, Mar Benyamin Shimun, of the great massacres that had been visited on his people in what was then called Persia and in his native Ottoman Empire. All around him, Assyrian villages, towns, and tribes were beginning to disappear. Deciding that his people would no longer be sheep led to the slaughter, he took up arms against his liege, the Sultan, and seceded from the Ottoman Empire. In response, the Grand Vizier of the Empire, Talaat Pasha, captured the Patriarch’s brother, threatening his execution. This was the Patriarch Mar Shimun’s response to the blackmail:” It is impossible for me and my people to surrender after seeing the atrocities done to my Assyrian people by your government; therefore, my brother is one, my people are many, I would rather lose my brother but not my nation.” On September 13, 1915, the Patriarch’s brother was hanged, and the Assyrians were fully thrust into the turbulence of war. Statistics and genocide scholars tell us that in this calamity alone, two-thirds of the Assyrian people were wiped out. Nevertheless, the Assyrians never gave up hope for self-determination, and despite fighting with outdated weaponry, became a formidable force in the Persian Campaign of the Great War, crying out, “Forth we go to battle in your name, O’ Mar Shimun!”
During this struggle against fascistic and supremacist forces, despite their unparalleled bravery, the Assyrian fighters under the command of General Agha Petros (who led the nation’s armed struggle alongside and with the blessing of Mar Benyamin Shimun), were always outnumbered and outgunned. In his book on the Kurdish Liberation Movement, Masoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq from 2005 to 2017, mentions how there had been an official agreement, between his ancestor and Kurdish leader of the time, Abdul Salam Barzani, and Mar Benyamin Shimun, the Assyrian Patriarch, as well as General Andranik Pasha, of the Armenian National Liberation Movement, to form a deal with the Allies for an Assyrian-Armenian-Kurdish Confederation centered in Urmia, which had been shaken by the First World War. The great powers had approved this dream, but sadly, he laments, upended by the warlord Simko Shikak, who invited Patriarch Mar Shimun into his home on March 3rd of 1918, dined with him, and soon after, as the Patriarch’s back was turned, gave the signal to the assassin he had personally positioned on the rooftop to end his life. Had the Patriarch lived and a confederation been formed between these three abused and neglected minorities, Assyrians, Armenians, and Kurds, the subsequent atrocities would not have been possible.
And so, with their leader dead, the Russians fallen to the Marxist Revolution, and all their allies, such as the British, French, and Americans, cut off from the region, the Assyrians were left amidst a sea of hostile enemies. Captain Gracey of the British armed forces contacted them by landing his plane in Urmia, convincing the Assyrians and the Armenians who had made their way there from the Ottoman province of Van under the leadership of Andranik Pasha, to flee south to Mesopotamia, where they could then regroup at the Bakuba refugee camp, and repatriate to their respective homelands of thousands of years.
Thus, on July 18, 1918, the Assyrian nation began its long exodus from Urmia in Persia to the British Protectorate of Iraq in Mesopotamia, leaving a trail of tears in their wake. Marauders followed them en route, robbing them, beating them, and killing them.
In his book, The Flickering Light of Asia, Assyrian-American Joel E. Varda recounts the miseries the Assyrians endured on that road. “The sufferings of the Assyrians throughout the long, tedious, and hazardous journey from Urmia to Hamadan are simply indescribable. In their haste for flight, many of these people failed to take provisions with them for the journey. Consequently, when the small rations were exhausted and the journey continued to become longer, the refugees tried to subsist solely on vegetation. Diseases broke out among the multitude, and were followed by the ravages of cholera. And as the enemy was now pursuing the fleeing Assyrians, they had no time to bury their dead, or to carry with them those who were held in the agonies of the dreaded contagion. Before Hamadan was reached, more than fifteen thousand bodies had been left unburied. As they fell asleep from fatigue and exhaustion, the pursuers stationed themselves over the hills that commanded the narrow road. As the morning broke, a most murderous fire was opened into the dense crowd. The crowds were so dense that the victims fell like leaves as from autumn trees.” The General who had committed this slaughter of fleeing and unarmed Assyrian women and children, telegrammed back to his superiors, “I have sent a few more thousand dogs into hell.”
Still, even with all they had endured and the major loss of all their holdings and lands up to that point, a hope remained, up until 1933, that the Assyrians could and would establish an independent Assyrian nation centered in Mosul, mere miles from the ancient Assyrian capital, Nineveh. This time, the newly formed Kingdom of Iraq would make sure such a dream would not come to pass. On August 7, 1933, an army set out from Baghdad and took to murdering over six thousand unarmed Assyrians in cold blood. Over a thousand Assyrian women and children were taken as slaves and brought back to Mosul. Assyrian clergymen were tortured. Pregnant women were bayoneted. So gruesome were the acts of the Iraqi army that the Polish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, referred to them as an example of what he meant by the term genocide when he formally introduced it in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Following this atrocity, later named the Semele Massacre, all Assyrian cultural movements moved underground.
In the coming decades, beginning on March 29, 1987, Saddam Hussein’s fascistic and nationalistic Ba’athist regime began a concentrated effort to wipe out all who were deemed enemies of the state: principally the Kurds, Assyrians, Turkomans, and Yezidis. Nearly 2000 villages were razed in the span of only two years, with 100,000 minorities murdered in cold blood, subject to torture and sham trials and executions. For the Assyrians, many of their villages and invaluable and ancient churches were destroyed, to make sure they would never return to the land. During this chaos, nearly half a million Kurds and Assyrians were forcibly relocated. The intention, undeniably, was not only to remove them from their lands but also to force upon them a cultural amnesia, so that slowly but surely, they would forget their language, history, culture, religion, and even their brotherhood and common cause.
In more recent memory, the situation has grown truly untenable. In August of 2014, ISIS razed Saint Elijah, Iraq’s oldest Christian monastery. In March 2015, they rigged the ancient city of Kalhu full of dynamite and turned thousands of years of priceless human heritage into dust within seconds. That same year, their sinister campaign against world heritage took to vandalizing the walls of ancient Nineveh, a biblically significant Assyrian city with a rich cultural past. ISIS thugs looted priceless religious texts, circulating them on black markets, robbing future generations of the knowledge held therein. In 2003, nearly one-and-a-half million Assyrians remained in Iraq, despite Saddam’s and ISIS’s efforts at emptying them out of their indigenous lands. Today, only a fifteenth of that, around 100,000, remain, nearly all of them in Kurdistan. This does not even get into the psychological warfare waged by ISIS against the minorities of the region, such as when, in October of 2015, they executed three Assyrians in Syria, whilst simultaneously kidnapping thousands of minority women, selling them into slavery.
Today, due to all this and more, the Assyrians have undeniably become a diaspora nation. And despite now residing in lands where they thrive alongside welcoming neighbors, the harrowing memories of their oppressors–the Ottoman Empire, and the fascist Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein–remain in the form of traumas passed on intergenerationally. Today, hundreds of thousands of Assyrian-Americans work towards achieving a piece of the American dream, contributing to this rich fabric and melting pot, all the while carrying with them bittersweet memories of their homeland, hoping that one day soon, these wounds will be healed.
