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Jilu Assyrians crossing the Asadabad Pass towards Baqubah, 1918. The Sayfo (Syriac: ܣܲܝܦܵܐ, lit. ' sword '), also known as the Seyfo or the Assyrian genocide, was the mass murder and deportation of Assyrian/Syriac Christians in southeastern Anatolia and Persia's Azerbaijan province by Ottoman forces and some Kurdish tribes during World War I.
The majority of the Assyrians affected by the massacres were adherents of the Church of the East (often dubbed Nestorian), who originally inhabited the mountainous Hakkari and Barwari regions covering parts of the modern provinces of Hakkâri, Şırnak and Van in Turkey and the Dohuk Governorate in Iraq, with a population ranging between 75,000 and 150,000.
A giant lamassu from the royal palace of the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II (r. 722–705 BC) at Dur-Sharrukin The history of the Assyrians encompasses nearly five millennia, covering the history of the ancient Mesopotamian civilization of Assyria, including its territory, culture and people, as well as the later history of the Assyrian people after the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 609 BC.
[304] A 2008 study on the genetics of "old ethnic groups in Mesopotamia", including 340 subjects from seven ethnic communities ("Assyrian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Armenian, Turkmen, the Arab peoples in Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait") found that Assyrians were homogeneous with respect to all other ethnic groups sampled in the study, regardless of ...
The Assyrians suffered a significant persecution with the religiously motivated large scale massacres conducted by the Muslim Turco-Mongol ruler Tamurlane in the 14th century AD. It was from this time that the ancient city of Assur was abandoned by Assyrians, and Assyrians were reduced to a minority within their ancient homeland. [20] [21]
In 1844 George Percy Badger working with Mar Shimun put the losses at 4,000 Assyrians dead. [3] Many Kurds were killed during the battles. [ 21 ] The Kurdish massacres were a precursor to the later incursions which ended both the autonomous status which the Assyrian tribes enjoyed, and that which the Kurds in the mountainous areas had as well.
Assyrians primarily lived in the provinces of Hakkari, Şırnak, and Mardin in southeastern Turkey, These areas had sizable Kurdish and Armenian populations. Starting in the nineteenth century, the Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians of eastern Anatolia, including the Hakkari mountains in Van province, were the subject of forced relocations and executions, a possible cause being religious persecution.
Thus he killed ten thousand Assyrians. Even though Bedirhan was a feudal tribal leader, he was expressing the aspirations of Kurdish nationalism." Kurdish and Arab attacks on Assyrians continued, culminating in the August 1933 Simele massacres. About 3000 Assyrians were killed in that single month alone. [18]