The Assyrians are an ancient, Semitic people whose roots are in ancient Mesopotamia—in the region of the Fertile Crescent—and who speak in an Eastern Aramaic dialect. The roots of the Assyrian people can be traced to the Sumerian-Akkadian Empire founded around 2,350 BCE. The Assyrian Empire emerged after the fall of the Akkadian Empire; at its height it controlled most of the territories in the ancient Near East. It was eventually overrun and occupied by the Babylonians.

The ancient Assyrian people traditionally prayed to multiple gods; in the early Middle Ages they converted to Christianity. Today the Assyrians are Christian and belong to various churches under the umbrella of Eastern Christianity, among others the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church. Following the spread of Islam, in the period in which it controlled the Middle East, the Assyrians were subjected to many pogroms and massacres; with time they became a persecuted and oppressed minority in their historical homeland.

In August 1894 an Armenian revolt erupted in the Sason district. The Ottomans responded to the revolt with great cruelty, murdering scores of Armenians. Armenian protests led to further massacres of Armenians, committed by Turks and Kurds over a three-year period. The killing initially directed at the Armenian population quickly spread to and afflicted all Christian minorities in the Empire. In the years 1895-1896 the Turks and Kurds butchered Assyrians in Diyarbakir and Urhoy. Some 25,000 Assyrians were murdered in this massacre, which became known as the “Hamidean Massacre,” named after Sultan Abdul Hamid II.

In 1909, the Ottoman Sultan was overthrown by a new political group – the “Young Turks”, a group eager for a modern, westernized style of government. At first, Armenians were hopeful that they would have a place in the new state, but they soon realized that the new government was xenophobic and exclusionary to the multi-ethnic Turkish society. To consolidate Turkish rule in the remaining territories of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks devised a secret program to exterminate the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian populations.

The Assyrian genocide was part of a policy of “Pan-Islamism” and “holy war” (Jihad) that the Ottoman regime enacted against the Christian minorities within the Empire: Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians. The Ottoman Empire’s Turkish military forces—in conjunction with armed Islamic militias (among them Kurds, Circassians, and Chechens)—carried out the genocide. The genocide took place mostly in 1915, nicknames “Year of the Sword.”

The genocide was launched in northwest Iran, which the Turks infiltrated in August 1914. Toward the end of 1914, Turkish and Kurdish forces successfully entered the villages surrounding Urmia and began evacuating Assyrians from their homes on the Ottoman-Iranian border. Upwards of 8,000 Assyrians were evacuated by January 1915. In January 1915, Djevdet Bey, the governor of Van, invaded Iran from the north and destroyed the Assyrian population in each city he conquered. He also burned the Assyrian villages he encountered and butchered the masses of refugees who attempted to flee. In February 1915, he stated: “We cleansed the Armenians and the Syrians (the Christians) from Iran and we’ll do so in Van as well.” On February 22, 1915 the Turkish army beheaded 41 Assyrian leaders. During February and March the Ottomans conquered more than 100 defenseless Assyrian villages, butchering all men, women and children and burning the villages to the ground. Approximately 20,000 Assyrians were murdered in this spree of slaughter. When the Ottomans reached Urmia they butchered 10,000 more Assyrians while an additional 4,000 died of hunger and disease after their forced evacuation from their homes. There are known cases of Turkish soldiers passing through the homes of Persians in order to look for Assyrians and Armenians in hiding and executing those found.

More than half of the residents of Siirt province in the Diyarbakir district (southeast Turkey) were Assyrians, and among them lived many Armenians. The Chaldean archbishop resided there. In the summer of 1915, a brigade of 8,000 soldiers, known as “The Brigade of Butchers,” entered Siirt. The Turks murdered the archbishop along with 4,000 Christians in the city of Siirt alone, in addition to 20,000 or so Assyrians in some 30 surrounding villages. The 300,000 Armenians and 90,000 Assyrians living in the districts of Diyarbakir, Van and Aleppo were annihilated under the command of Rashid Bey beginning in June 1915; thousands were murdered on-site, others were led in convoys to the desert.

The Assyrians were successful in fending off the Turks for a few months on the Hakkari Mountains in southeast Turkey. Finally in July 1915, the Turks broke the Assyrian line of defense and burned the remaining villages and with it destroyed every trace of Assyrian presence.

Following the Russian invasion of Urmia, Agha Petros commanded an Assyrian army of volunteers that fought alongside the Entente Powers. Following the Russian retreat from the military campaign the Assyrians were cut off, few in number, and surrounded. After they were defeated the entire Assyrian population of Urmia was wiped out, 200 villages were destroyed and 65,000 Assyrian refugees died in episodes of mass murder, “convoys of death,” and as a result of hunger and disease. Several thousand refugees who managed to make it to Turkey were massacred on arrival. On the eve of the First World War, estimates of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Assyrians lived in the Ottoman Empire and Iran; between 275,000 and 300,000 of them were murdered in the genocide.

The Assyrians were successful in fending off the Turks for a few months on the Hakkari Mountains in southeast Turkey. Finally in July 1915, the Turks broke the Assyrian line of defense and burned the remaining villages and with it destroyed every trace of Assyrian presence.

n mid-1918 the British army convinced the Ottomans to grant them access to 30,000 or so Assyrians across Iran. The British decided to transport the Assyrians from Iran to Baquba, Iraq. The transfer lasted a mere 25 days, yet 7,000 Assyrians died on the way. Some died of hunger, exhaustion and disease, while others fell victim to attacks by Islamic and Kurdish militias. In Iraq, too, the Assyrians suffered from similar incursions.

In 1920 the British decided to close down the camps in Baquba. The majority of Assyrians who lived in the camps preferred to return to the Hakkari Mountains; the rest dispersed across Iraq, where a 5,000-year-old Assyrian community lives.