Sayfo; The Events in Hikkari Mountains 19th & 20th Century

The Atrocities and Attacks Against East Syriac Christians in Eastern Turkey

In the early nineteenth century, the East Syriac population in northern Mesopotamia and Kurdistan lived under a traditional tribal system led by the Mar Shimun Patriarchal family who exercised both secular and religious authority from their seat in Qudshanis in the Hikkari mountains area in Eastern Turkey. The most significant early recorded cycle of massacres occurred between 1843 and 1846 during a period of Ottoman centralization that clashed with the power of local Kurdish emirates. Badir Khan Beg, the Kurdish Emir of Bohtan, and Nur-Allah, the Emir of Hakkari, launched coordinated military campaigns against the independent Nestorian tribes after the latter supported the losing side in a Kurdish succession dispute. In 1843, an estimated seven to ten thousand East Syriac mountaineers were killed in the Tiari district alone, with hundreds of women and children captured and sold into slavery. Mar Shimun Abraham fled his home and sought asylum at the British consulate in Mosul while his mother was captured, mutilated, and thrown into the Great Zab River. A second invasion in 1846 specifically targeted the Tkhuma district, destroying villages that had been overlooked in the first campaign and resulting in several thousand more deaths. Geopolitical records from this period document an 1843 appeal by Mar Shimun to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the British government requesting protection from Badir Khan. Also, in May 1843, Mar Shimun wrote to the Rev. G.P. Badger informing him of the imminent threat from Badir Khan and requesting British intervention. The Ottoman government eventually arrested and deported Badir Khan in 1847 following heavy diplomatic pressure from Great Britain and Russia.

The Hamidian period in the late 19th century, was characterized by the institutionalization of Kurdish tribal power through the creation of the Hamidiye irregular cavalry regiments in 1891, which were placed outside civil law and granted immunity to repress Christian populations. While the widespread massacres of 1894 to 1896 primarily targeted the Armenian and west Syriac communities, East Syriac communities in the Van Vilayet and Hakkari borderlands suffered similar levels of violence and property destruction. In late 1895, the carnage extended across the Diyarbakir province where thousands of Christians were killed or forced to convert to Islam, including 55,000 Syriacs from different denominations according to some reports. In June 1896, Mar Gawriel, the metropolitan bishop for the Church of the East in Urmia, was assassinated along with his nephew and an archdeacon while visiting Kurdish leaders across the border in Shemdinan. Geopolitical communications indicate that during the height of the 1895 massacres, the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch AbdulMasih II petitioned Sultan Abd al-Hamid II for protection, which resulted in a royal decree that spared some Syriac communities while others were destroyed.

This era between 1898-1914 was marked by increasing border instability between the Ottoman Empire and Persia and a significant shift in East Syriac diplomatic strategy. In 1898, East Syriac bishops in Urmia successfully petitioned the Russian Holy Synod for inclusion in the Russian Orthodox Church to secure military aid and a Russian Orthodox mission was established in Urmia, leading to the mass conversion of approximately 20,000 Nestorians who sought Russian military protection against Kurdish raids. In August 1908, Turkish troops crossed the border and occupied the Tergawar region, plundering villages and expelling thousands of Syriac Christians from their lands. By 1912, the Russian army occupied Urmia and Khoi, providing a temporary sense of security for the Christian inhabitants while Mar Shimun Patriarch Benjamin began secret negotiations with Russian diplomats in Tiflis. In July 1914, Talaat Pasha telegraphed the Mosul government for a report on the Nestorians as a prelude to deportation and the Ottoman decree signaled the coming genocide by ordering a report on the Nestorian population size, locations, and political orientations to determine appropriate steps for their removal. In October 1914, even before the formal declaration of war, approximately seventy-one men from the Gawar district were arrested and killed at Bashkala.

In May 1915, a tribal assembly under Mar Shimun Benjamin made a formal declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire after repeated massacres in Bashkala and Urmia. The intensive extermination campaign against East Syriacs began with an October 1914 decree from Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha ordering the deportation and dispersal of Nestorians from the Persian border area to ensure they did not exceed twenty dwellings in any location. Between January and May 1915, Ottoman forces and Kurdish irregulars occupied the Urmia region, where they carried out mass executions of Christian men, including the murder of over 700 civilians at Haftevan. In June 1915, the Vali of Mosul, Haydar Bey, commanded a massive military invasion of the Hakkari mountains involving 40,000 regular troops and massed Kurdish tribes. The East Syriac tribes organized a heroic resistance in Tiari, Tkhuma, and Jilu but were eventually overwhelmed by modern artillery and forced to retreat to high mountain peaks before fleeing to Iran and in October 1915, Mar Shimun begged the Russians for food and ammunition as his people were dying of hunger in the mountains. In Siirt, the Vali Jevdet Bey orchestrated a general massacre in June 1915 where thousands of adults were killed and children were separated from their mothers to be executed at Ras-el-Hadjar. The Patriarch Mar Shimun Benjamin was assassinated in March 1918 by the Kurdish leader Simko during a diplomatic meeting in Salamas. Military and ecclesiastical records show that the East Syriacs joined forces with the Russian army as volunteers after the 1915 invasion, only to be abandoned when Russian forces withdrew following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Following the murder of the Patriarch and the Ottoman advance into northern Iran in the summer of 1918, approximately 50,000 East Syriacs undertook a traumatic exodus toward British-controlled Iraq and accordking to Bryce, only 25,000 people were able to cross the mountainous border and arrive in Urmia. Thousands of refugees died from heat, disease, and starvation during the trek to Hamadan and eventually to the Baqubah refugee camp near Baghdad that housed about 32,000 refugees. The surviving population was contained in camps under British protection, which effectively dissolved their traditional mountainous tribal structures as they became permanent refugees. In the post-war period, East Syriac leaders accepted a draft into the British Levies to guard the frontier on the promise of an autonomous homeland, a commitment that the British government abandoned following the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.

In 1922 and 1924, groups of East Syriacs attempted to return to their ancestral lands in the Hakkari mountains but were violently expelled by the forces of the new Turkish Republic.  During the 1923 Lausanne Treaty negotiations, the Turkish delegate Ismet Inönü refused to consider compensation for the Assyro-Chaldeans, claiming they were treacherous toward their Muslim neighbors.

In August 1933, the East Syriac community in the newly independent Iraq was targeted by the Iraqi army and local irregulars. The systematic massacres occurred in Simele and approximately sixty surrounding villages, resulting in the killing of thousands of civilians and the final dispersal of the survivors. Iraqi authorities used state violence and propaganda to frame the community as rebels, leading to their further displacement into the Khabur region of Syria and other parts of the world.