Sayfo; Village of Duger

Village of Duger

About 50 Syriac families lived in Duger and the majority of which came from Hbob. Among them lived three or four Kurdish families. Priest Malke from the Mushil Quryo family served in that village and before that he served in Mharkan. Some Syriac people from Mharkan had fled from their village and lived in Duger and the Kurdish villages, because they were afraid that they had to serve in the Ottoman army. After the attackers reached Helwa and attacked all men there, their leader, Qedur Bey sent about fifteen soldiers to Duger in order to also capture all the men there. The villagers were very much afraid when they heard that and they wondered whether there was still any way out of this. A young man, Joseph, from Zaz, managed to climb on a high roof to see what was going on, and he saw that all enemy personnel were asleep and that their rifles had been put against the wall. He descended immediately and told priest Malke Yaqub and others about it and said: "Let us overpower and kill them, and then escape to the mountains with their weapons." But they answered: "We cannot do that because our village has been promised that there is no danger for the Syriac People." 

As the village people rejected his idea, he and a few others fled into the mountains and they were saved. Those who didn’t join them, stayed behind in the village. Many Kurdish bandits together with the soldiers, locked up the villagers that had stayed behind in a large house; then they searched all the houses, and nobody managed to escape. All of them were tied with ropes, taken to Helwa, massacred together with the Syriac people there and thrown into the river. Priest Malke was murdered on the way because he was not a good walker, as he was an old man. He was harassed in a terrible way, and they ordered him to convert to Islam and renounce Christ, but he resolutely refused. He was killed long before the bandits had reached the river. Then they collected all the women and children, took them to the village of Nusran and stabbed them there.