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Mardin kaza
Village of Deli (near Mardin): About 5,000 Kurds and Arabs attacked the village. Although 120 militiamen were initially posted to protect Christians, they quickly switched sides. The village was plundered, people killed in their homes, and fires raged for 8 days, visible from Mardin. A Turkish official found 1,700 corpses there. There was a reported 3,200 deaths in Deli, with few survivors.
Village of Shufirnassa: Only one Syriac family lived in this village. Their leader was Aphrem Abdo. He was clubbed to death, together with his family.
Village of Terbesse: The village of Terbessé is situated within the Gozarto region on the eastern plains of Nisibis, a district that historically fell under the Mardin sanjak of the Ottoman Empire in an area called Gazarto and is currently located within the borders of Syria. Before any attack occurred at the onset of Sayfo, the village was inhabited by approximately 500 Syriac Orthodox people. In 1915, the Gozarto region was invaded by Muhallemi militia units and irregular çete death squads organized by Qaddur Bey, a Turkish officer and head of the Al-Khamsin militia in Nisibis. These perpetrators carried out a systematic campaign of extermination against rural Christian villages, and records indicate that Qaddur Bey killed all Syriacs he encountered as he moved through the plains. While specific details on the fate of the Syriac community and their properties in Terbessé are missing, the village was part of a larger zone that faced nearly total depopulation and displacement during the genocide.
Village of Tizharab: Was located in the Mardin Province, situated within the eastern plains of the Nisibis district on the lower slopes of the Izlo mountain range. The village is listed in the Ottoman Temettuat registers of 1845, confirming its existence as a populated Syriac Christian village during this era. The Syriac Orthodox Patriarchal Register of 1870 identifies Tizharab as having ten dues-paying households and an active ecclesiastical life centered on the Church of Mor Quryaqus, and the spiritual leadership documented during this phase included Priest Eliyyo and Priest Elyyas. Atrocities against the inhabitants of Tizharab began in the Hamidian massacres from 1895 to 1897. During this time, Tizharab was specifically targeted and subjected to plundering. These attacks were part of a broader wave of violence perpetrated by Kurdish tribes and local Muslim groups against Syriac settlements in the Mardin and Diyarbekir regions. Archival records emphasize that the village was looted and its property destroyed during this interval. During the Syriac massacres in 1915, Tizharab was the site of a general massacre resulting in the total destruction of its Syriac Orthodox community. Before the onslaught in 1915, the village population was estimated at approximately twenty-five families. The perpetrators of these killings were identified as Kurdish irregular forces and local armed groups who exploited the wartime conditions to exterminate the Christian population of the Nisibin district. The destruction was part of a systematic campaign that left the majority of the Syriac heartland in ruins, with only those individuals who managed to flee to isolated forested areas or fortified monastic refuges such as the Zafaran Monastery surviving. Following the cessation of atrocities, the village remained largely depopulated of its original Syriac community, and the ecclesiastical infrastructure, specifically the Church of Mor Quryaqus, was left in a state of ruin or abandonment.
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