Sayfo, Village of Ganaskar

Village of Ganaskar

The village of Ganaskar is located on the Beshiri plain on the left bank of the Tigris River, positioned north of the Tur Abdin plateau and east of the major regional city of Diyarbekir. It is part of the Beshiri district of the Batman province, which was historically part of the Diyarbekir Vilayet. The village, also recorded as Cinasker, was documented as a mixed residence for Armenian and Syriac Orthodox populations during the late nineteenth-century Ottoman administrative period.

There are no documented atrocities or attacks against Syriac and Armenian Christians in this village before the 1915 Sayfo genocide. However, the entire area of the Beshiri plain experienced waves of violence throughout documented history.

During the summer of 1915, the Syriac and Armenian inhabitants of the Beshiri plain, including those at Ganaskar, were targeted for deportation and systematic massacre. The local Muslim sub-governor of the Beshiri region initially refused to execute the extermination orders issued by the central Ottoman government in Constantinople, which resulted in his arrest and murder by state authorities. The primary perpetrators of the atrocities in the district were the Ottoman military and coordinated Kurdish tribal groups. The violence resulted in the near-total elimination of the Christian presence in the Beshiri district and the complete destruction of most Christian villages in the district.