Assyrians: Region History
The Assyrians are one of the world's oldest continuous peoples: the indigenous, Aramaic-speaking Christian nation of Mesopotamia, descended from ancient Assyria and organized through the Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church, and the Syriac Orthodox and Catholic traditions. Their homeland spans northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and northwestern Iran. Across the last century that homeland has been the site of a nearly unbroken sequence of mass atrocity: the Sayfo of 1915, in which Ottoman forces and allied Kurdish irregulars killed as many as 250,000 Assyrians, roughly half the nation; the Simele massacre of 1933; the post-2003 jihadist bombing and assassination campaigns; and the Islamic State's 2014 conquest of Mosul and the Nineveh Plains, formally recognized as genocide by the United States and the European Parliament. A community of roughly 1.5 million in Iraq in 2003 has fallen below 250,000 today, and what remains survives under militia occupation and demographic pressure that continue, by quieter means, the logic of elimination that produced the Sayfo.
Part I · Historical Foundations
Ancient Civilization, Christian Continuity, and the Road to Catastrophe
Assyrian history begins in the third millennium BCE with the city of Assur and reaches its ancient apex in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, whose capital at Nineveh held the library of Ashurbanipal and the Epic of Gilgamesh. The empire fell in 612 BCE, but the people persisted on the same land, keeping their Aramaic language through successive Persian, Hellenistic, and Sasanian rule. They adopted Christianity among the earliest of any people, and the Church of the East became one of the great intellectual engines of late antiquity: its School of Nisibis was among the world's first universities, its scholars carried Greek learning into Syriac and Arabic, and its missionaries reached India and Tang-dynasty China. Syriac remains the liturgical language of Assyrian churches, and modern Aramaic dialects are still spoken in Assyrian homes today.
Under Ottoman rule the Assyrians survived as subordinated Christian communities: the semi-autonomous mountain tribes of Hakkari under the Mar Shimun patriarchate, the monastic civilization of Tur Abdin anchored by the Mor Gabriel Monastery (founded 397 CE), the agricultural Urmia plain in Iran, and the Chaldean towns of Mosul and the Nineveh Plains. The First World War destroyed this world. Beginning in 1915, in parallel with the Armenian genocide, Ottoman forces and Kurdish irregulars annihilated Assyrian communities across all three highland regions in the catastrophe Assyrians call the Sayfo, "the sword." Britain recruited the survivors as wartime allies, later calling them "our smallest ally," but the promised protection never came: the postwar settlements granted the Assyrians nothing, and the Simele massacre of 1933, carried out by the army of newly independent Iraq, confirmed the pattern that has governed Assyrian existence since: a stateless indigenous nation left unprotected each time the states around it turn to violence.
We are the remnant of a great nation, reduced by the sword and the famine and the flight. All we have asked, from that day to this, is to live on our own land in safety. That request has never once been granted.
Assyrian survivor testimony, Sayfo oral history collectionsPart II · Jihadism and Ideological Pressure
Jihadism as the Driver of the Contemporary Assyrian Crisis
The contemporary crisis of the Assyrian people is the product of an explicitly religious jihadist campaign. After 2003, al-Qaeda in Iraq and its successors targeted Iraq's Christians with coordinated church bombings, kidnappings framed as jizya collection, and assassinations of clergy, including Chaldean Archbishop of Mosul Paulos Faraj Rahho in 2008 and 58 worshippers killed at Baghdad's Our Lady of Salvation cathedral in 2010. The Islamic State brought the program to its fullest expression in 2014: an ultimatum to Mosul's Christians of conversion, jizya, exile, or death; the marking of Christian homes with the letter nun; and the August conquest of the Nineveh Plains, which displaced more than 100,000 Christians overnight, including the entire town of Qaraqosh. In February 2015 ISIS extended the campaign into Syria, attacking the 35 Assyrian villages of the Khabur valley, founded by survivors of Simele, and abducting more than 200 people.
Military defeat of ISIS did not restore the homeland. The Assyrian towns of the Nineveh Plains now sit under Iran-aligned militias whose commanders have been sanctioned by the United States for abuses against the communities they claim to protect. USCIRF, the Assyrian Policy Institute, and church authorities have documented land expropriation, checkpoint extortion, and demographic settlement of Christian agricultural land, while Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government treat the Assyrian presence as a bargaining asset in their dispute over the territories. Fewer than half of the displaced have returned. For Assyrians the pattern is familiar: massacre followed by land seizure, ratified by state indifference.
ISIS took our towns with guns. What is taking them now is quieter: a checkpoint here, a land registry there, a family that decides its children have no future on the Nineveh Plains.
Assyrian community leader, Nineveh Plains, testimony collected by international religious freedom monitors, 2019Part III · Assyrian Communities
Assyrian Peoples: An Ethnic & Cultural Encyclopedia
The Assyrian nation is one people organized through several church traditions, each with its own geography and experience of persecution. Some members identify as Assyrian, others as Chaldean, Syriac, or Aramean; this dossier uses "Assyrian" in its broad national sense while respecting the distinct identities within it.
Heirs of the ancient Church of the East that once stretched to China, these communities survived into the modern era as the semi-autonomous mountain tribes of Hakkari and the villages of the Urmia plain. The Sayfo emptied Hakkari permanently in 1915 and devastated Urmia; the survivors, resettled in Iraq, were struck again at Simele in 1933, and thousands fled to the Khabur valley in Syria, where ISIS attacked their 35 villages in 2015 and abducted more than 200 people.
In communion with Rome since the sixteenth century, the Chaldeans became the largest Christian body in Iraq and the backbone of urban Assyrian life in Mosul and Baghdad, with ancient monasteries at Alqosh and Rabban Hormizd. The post-2003 jihadist campaign struck them hardest of all: the bombing campaigns, the murder of Archbishop Rahho, the 2014 expulsion from Mosul, and the emptying of the Plains towns fell overwhelmingly on Chaldean parishes.
The West Syriac communities sustained one of the deepest continuous Christian cultures anywhere: the monastic plateau of Tur Abdin, anchored by Mor Gabriel Monastery since 397 CE. Tur Abdin was devastated in the Sayfo and drained by a century of emigration to roughly two thousand people today. The Syriac Catholic branch dominated Qaraqosh, the largest Christian town in Iraq, emptied of its 50,000 people in a single night in August 2014.
Created by the Sayfo, enlarged by Simele, and swollen by every subsequent Iraqi and Syrian crisis, the diaspora now contains the clear majority of the nation. Diaspora campaigns secured Sweden's 2010 recognition of the genocide and drove the international genocide designations of 2016, and since 2014 the diaspora has served as the homeland's documentation and advocacy arm, monitoring militia abuses and funding reconstruction.
Appendix · Crimes Against Assyrian Peoples
Crimes Against Assyrian Peoples: The Historical Record and Contemporary Violations
The events below span more than a century. Not one has been subject to a criminal tribunal, a truth commission, or any adequate process of restitution. They remain unresolved, and in the case of the pressure on the Nineveh Plains, ongoing.
Within a year of Iraq's admission to the League of Nations, its army under General Bakr Sidqi massacred Assyrian civilians in Simele and more than sixty surrounding villages, killing between 600 and 3,000 people. Sidqi was promoted and received as a national hero in Baghdad. The massacre led the jurist Raphael Lemkin to cite the Assyrian case in the 1933 legal proposals from which the concept of genocide would grow. Thousands of survivors fled to the Khabur valley in Syria, where ISIS would attack their descendants in 2015.
Between 2003 and 2014, al-Qaeda in Iraq and its successors waged an explicitly religious campaign of church bombings, jizya-framed kidnappings, and clergy assassinations. Father Ragheed Ganni was murdered outside his Mosul church in 2007; Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was abducted and killed in 2008. Iraq's Christian population fell from roughly 1.5 million to perhaps half a million before ISIS ever appeared. Prosecutions were effectively nonexistent.
ISIS's campaign was genocide by formal designation of the United States and the European Parliament in 2016. Its elements were explicit in ISIS's own pronouncements: the ultimatum of conversion, jizya, exile, or death; the marking and confiscation of Christian property; the enslavement of Christian women and children; and the destruction of every visible sign of Christian worship, including the fourth-century Mar Behnam Monastery. No international tribunal has been established, and prosecutions under terrorism statutes record neither the victims' identity nor the crime's genocidal character.
Since liberation in 2017, the Assyrian towns of the Nineveh Plains have come under Iran-aligned Popular Mobilization units, including forces whose commanders the United States has sanctioned for abuses against the communities they claim to protect. USCIRF, the Assyrian Policy Institute, and church authorities have documented land expropriation, checkpoint extortion, intimidation of returnees, and settlement of non-Christian populations onto Christian agricultural land. Fewer than half of the displaced have returned, completing by attrition the displacement ISIS began with force.
The Sayfo was carried out in parallel with, and by the same governing apparatus as, the Armenian genocide, and shared its methods: organized massacre by military and irregular forces, the abduction and forced marriage of women and girls, death marches, the destruction of churches and monasteries, and the confiscation of the property of the dead. Hakkari was invaded and emptied permanently; the Urmia plain was devastated in successive waves through 1918, including the assassination of the patriarch Mar Shimun XIX Benyamin under a flag of truce; and the villages of Tur Abdin were besieged and massacred through the summer of 1915. The subsequent flight of the entire Urmia community toward British lines killed thousands more on the road and ended organized Assyrian life in the ancestral highlands.
A nation that entered the twentieth century compact on its own land ended the war as scattered refugees, and the losses of 1915 to 1918 are the foundation of every subsequent Assyrian catastrophe. Recognition has come late and partially: Sweden's parliament recognized the genocide in 2010 and several other states have followed, while Turkey denies the events constituted genocide. No perpetrator was ever tried, no property returned, and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne extinguished Assyrian claims without granting Assyrians a seat at the table where their fate was decided.
If you or your community have been affected by the events described in this report, we invite you to contribute to our documentation record.
