Country: Iraq

Group: Assyrian

Date Finalized: 10/26/2022

Team: Samuel Kniery (lead), Gabby Staker, Noelle Colling, Juwairiah Afridi, Aria Robinson

Content Warning: Genocide, Ethnocide, Displacement, Forced-Labor, Starvation, Kidnapping, Sexual Abuse, Slavery

Approximate Time Period: 1840 – Present

The Assyrians are an ethnoreligious minority group within Iraq whose cultural identity traces back to early Bronze-Age Aramaean communities that resided throughout Northern Mesopotamia. In the 1st century AD, Assyrians adopted the Christian faith; however, by the 4th century AD, liturgical disagreements between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches resulted in the establishment of several distinct Eastern Christian sects (Travis, 2019). Except for a series of Mongol invasions in the 13th century AD, Assyrians maintained a largely peaceful coexistence with neighboring ethnic and political groups until the 1840s, when international involvement from European and American missionaries triggered a radical shift in local power relations (Minority Rights Group, 2015; Petrosian, 2006). In July 1843, a Kurdish military force led by Bedir Khan Beg massacred thousands of Tiyari and Diz Assyrians in the Hakkari region, selling many into slavery for their refusal to pay tribute (Petrosian, 2006). A second Kurdish assault in 1846 on the Tkhuma Assyrians resulted in an estimated 10,000 additional deaths and the destruction of several settlements (Jwaideh, 2006). American and British missionaries reported the atrocities to the western press, invigorating the Ottoman Empire to overthrow the remaining Kurdish Emirates between 1847 and 1850. Although the destruction of the Kurdish Emirs reduced direct attacks against Assyrian communities, ethnic tensions grew among Sunni and Kurdish groups, who saw the Assyrians as beholden to colonial powers. In 1895, Ottomans killed thousands of Assyrians and kidnapped hundreds of women and children for sexual slavery (Travis, 2006, 2019). Assyrian involvement in a revolt against the Ottomans on behalf of Tsarist Russia in 1915 and their subsequent retreat into British-occupied Iraq in 1917 resulted in further ostracization and loss of local autonomy (Minority Rights Group, 2015). Although exact demographic details remain highly contested, Assyrians claim that during the “Sayfo” (Assyrian Genocide), Ottoman soldiers and Kurdish irregulars, under the leadership of Djevdet Bey, slaughtered 300,000 to 750,000 Assyrians and destroyed hundreds of settlements (AINA n.d.; Assyrian Policy Institute, 2019; Atman, 2020). Despite ceasefire agreements, on March 16, 1918, a Kurdish tribal leader assassinated the Patriarch of the Assyrian Church, Mar Shimum Benjamin, along with several bodyguards (Petrosian, 2006). The British colonial administrators used Assyrians to repel the Turkish invasion of 1922-1923 and to crush successive Arab and Kurd rebellions, substantially increasing ethnic divisions between the Muslim and Christian communities (Malek 1935; Minority Rights Group 2015). The departure of the British colonial administration resulted in the establishment of an Arab-led Iraqi government in 1932 and the continuation of the Assyrian genocide. Beginning on August 7, 1933, the Iraqi Army launched Assyrian pogroms throughout the country. Later known as the Simele massacre, it featured the mass execution of 600-6,000 individuals and the burning and looting of Assyrian homes (Assyrian Policy Institute, 2019; Donabed, 2010; Minority Rights Group, 2015). The Iraqi military immediately claimed the Kurds exclusively instigated the massacre (Petrosian, 2006). Denied direct representation over the following decades, Assyrians operated at the fringes of Iraqi politics, alternating support between Kurdish nationalist movements and the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) until the late 1970s. In 1972, the Iraqi government offered political representation to the Assyrians on the condition that they would mobilize to attack the Kurds; however, the Assyrian leadership flatly refused. By 1977, in response to the budding Kurdish-Assyrian alliance, the Iraqi government proceeded to foment inter-ethnic division between Assyrian-Chaldeans and Eastern Church Assyrians (Petrosian, 2006). The formation of the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM) in 1979 brought Assyrians into direct competition with the Ba’athist party of Iraq (Minority Rights Group, 2015). By 1982, the ADM formally joined the Kurds in open conflict against the regime, resulting in the targeted destruction of property and the murder of civilians by the Iraqi Army (Minority Rights Group, 2015). From 1980 to 1991, the Iran-Iraq War and Kuwait campaign disproportionately impacted Assyrians, with an estimated 60,000 killed, captured, or missing (Petrosian, 2006). Saddam Hussein’s 1988 Anfal campaign against the united Kurdish-Assyrian opposition left thousands of Assyrian civilians dead- including civil officials, medical workers, and religious leaders- and displaced an estimated 40,000 individuals (Minority Rights Group, 2015; Petrosian, 2006). From 1977 to 1997, Iraqi Arabization census policies denied Assyrians ethnic identification, arbitrarily registering individuals as Arab or Kurd (Minority Rights Group, 2015; Petrosian, 2006). Furthermore, Arabization policies, such as Decree 251, targeted Assyrian language use in schools (UNPO, 2018). Throughout the 1990s, Saddam Hussein’s regime leveraged the United Nations Oil-for-Food program to force Assyrians to renounce their ethnicity (Human Rights Watch, 2004; Petrosian, 2006). By 2001, the Iraqi government had displaced hundreds of thousands of Assyrians around Kirkuk. When Hussein’s regime collapsed in December 2003, sectarian and religious civil wars erupted throughout Iraq. Militants targeted Assyrian civilians for killings, bombings, kidnappings, torture, forced conversions, and dispossession- including burning and bombing Assyrian businesses, schools, churches, and homes (Donabed, 2010; Minority Rights Group, 2015). Violence continued through the 2000s, culminating in 2010 with an attack on an Assyrian church in Baghdad that left 56 dead and 78 wounded (Minority Rights Group, 2015). On August 6, 2014, the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) advanced on the city of Mosul, forcing approximately 200,000 individuals to flee the region, confiscating their belongings and identification documents as they escaped. ISIS militants specially marked Assyrian homes as property of the new Islamic State and destroyed ancient Assyrian cultural artifacts and historical buildings (Minority Rights Group, 2015). ISIS militants destroyed all 45 Assyrian churches and monasteries in Mosul (UNPO, 2018).  From 2014 to 2019, ISIS forces kidnapped an unknown number of Assyrians for forced labor and sexual exploitation, many of whom remain missing (Amnesty International, 2014; UNPO, 2018). Following the collapse of ISIS, Iran and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) rebuffed attempts by Assyrians to return to Iraq. From 2017 to 2019, Iranian-backed ethnoreligious paramilitary groups such as the 30th and 50th brigades prevented Assyrians from returning to Iraq. Approximate estimates of the Assyrian population of Iraq demonstrate a nearly 90% decline since 2003; of the 33 predominately Assyrian villages in Iraq, only 4 remain (UNPO, 2018; Zaya, 2020).

Given the substantial historical and contemporary documentation of ethnocide against Assyrians and the present destabilization of the region, there exists a significant risk of Assyrian ethnocide persisting into the future (Minority Rights Group, 2015; UNPO, 2018).

Data Quality: Data quality for the Assyrian Ethnocide is rated a 3/3 due to the significant amount of historical and contemporary evidence from local, media, and academic peer-reviewed sources.

Sources

  1. AINA. “The Assyrian Genocide.” Retrieved from http://www.aina.org/genocide100.html (October 26, 2022).
  2. Amnesty International. 2014. Ethnic Cleansing on Historic Scale: The Islamic State’s Systematic Targeting of Minorities in Northern Iraq. Retrieved from https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/mde140112014en.pdf.
  3. Assyrian Policy Institute. 2019. “Assyrian Genocide in Modern History.” : 17.
  4. Atman, Sabri. 2020. “How Many Assyrians Were Killed in the Assyrian Genocide.” Seyfocenter. Retrieved from https://www.seyfocenter.com/english/how-many-assyrians-were-killed-in-the-assyrian-genocide/ (October 26, 2022).
  5. Donabed, Sargon George. 2010. Iraq and the Assyrian Unimagining: Illuminating Scaled Suffering and a Hierarchy of Genocide from Simele to Anfal. University of Toronto (Canada). Retrieved from https://central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.item?id=TC-OTU-32925&op=pdf&app=Library&oclc_number=1032962380.
  6. Human Rights Watch. 2004. Claims in Conflict: Reversing Ethnic Cleansing in Northern Iraq. Human Rights Watch. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/report/2004/08/02/claims-conflict/reversing-ethnic-cleansing-northern-iraq (October 20, 2022).
  7. Jwaideh, Wadie. 2006. The Kurdish National Movement: Its Origins and Development. Syracuse University Press.
  8. Malek, Yusuf. 1935. The British Betrayal of the Assyrians. Retrieved from http://www.aina.org/books/bbota.pdf.
  9. Minority Rights Group. 2015. “Assyrians.” Minority Rights Group. Retrieved from https://minorityrights.org/minorities/assyrians-2/ (October 20, 2022).
  10. Petrosian, Vahram. 2006. “Assyrians in Iraq.” Iran and the Caucasus 10(1): 113–48.
  11. Travis, Hannibal. 2006. “‘Native Christians Massacred’: The Ottoman Genocide of the Assyrians during World War I.” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 1(3). Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1233&context=gsp.
  12. ———. 2019. The Assyrian Genocide: Cultural and Political Legacies. Routledge.
  13. UNPO. 2018. “Assyrian Universal Alliance.” Retrieved from https://unpo.org/members/7859 (October 26, 2022).
  14. Zaya, R. S. 2020. “Iraq’s Indigenous Peoples Can’t Face Another Conflict.” Foreign Policy. Retrieved from https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/07/iraq-assyrian-indigenous-peoples-another-conflict-nineveh-plains-iran-backed-militia/ (October 20, 2022).