Assyrian Genocide - Documented Accounts of The Genocide

Documented Accounts of The Genocide

Assyrians in what is now Turkey primarily lived in the provinces of Hakkari, Şırnak, and Mardin. These areas also had a sizable Kurdish population.

The following newspaper articles documented the Assyrian genocide as it occurred:

• Assyrians Burned in Church, Lowell Sun (Massachusetts), 1915
• Assyrians Massacred in Urmia, San Antonio Light (Texas), 1915
• Assyrians Massacred in Urmiah, Salt Lake Tribune (Utah), 1915
• Chaldean Victims of the Turks, The Times (United Kingdom), 22 November 1919, p 11
• Christian Massacres in Urmiah, The Argus (Australia), 1915
• Extermination of the Armenian Race, The Manchester Guardian (United Kingdom), 1915
• Many Assyrian Perish, Winnipeg Free Press (Canada), 1915
• Massacred by Kurds; Christians Unable to Flee from Urmia Put to Death, Washington Post, 14 March 1915, p10
• Massacres of Nestorians in Urmia, The New York Times (New York), 1915
• Massacres Kept Up, The Washington Post (USA), 26 March 1915, 1.
• Native Christians Massacred; Frightful Atrocities in Persia, Los Angeles Times, 2 April 1915, p I-1
• Nestorian Christians Flee Urmia, The New York Times (New York), 1915
• Syrian Tells of Atrocities, Los Angeles Times (California), Dec. 15, 1918, at I–1.
• The Assyrian Massacres, Manchester Guardian (United Kingdom), Dec. 5, 1918, at 4
• The Suffering Serbs and Armenians, The Manchester Guardian (United Kingdom), 1915, p5
• Turkish Horrors in Persia, The New York Times (New York), 11 October 1915
• Turks Kill Christians in Assyria, Muscatine Journal (Iowa), 1915
• Turkish Troops Massacring Assyrians, Newark Advocate (New Jersey), 1915
• Turkish Horrors in Persia, The New York Times (New York), 1915
• The Total of Armenian and Syrian Dead, Current History: A Monthly Magazine of the New York Times, November 1916, 337–38

Hannibal Travis, Assistant Professor of Law at Florida International University, wrote in the peer-reviewed journal Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal that:

Numerous articles in the American press documented the genocide of Assyrians by the Turks and their Kurdish allies. By 1918, The Los Angeles Times carried the story of a Syrian, or most likely an Assyrian, merchant from Urmia who stated that his city was ‘‘completely wiped out, the inhabitants massacred,’’ 200 surrounding villages ravaged, 200,000 of his people dead, and hundreds of thousands of more starving to death in exile from their agricultural lands. In an article entitled ‘‘Native Christians Massacred,’’ the Associated Press correspondent reported that in the vicinity of Urmia, ‘‘Turkish regular troops and Kurds are persecuting and massacring Assyrian Christians.’’ Close to 800 were confirmed dead in Urmia, and another 2,000 had perished from disease. Two hundred Assyrians had been burned to death inside a church, and the Russians had discovered more than 700 bodies of massacre victims in the village of Hafdewan outside Urmia, ‘‘mostly naked and mutilated,’’ some with gunshot wounds, others decapitated, and still others carved to pieces.

Other leading British and American newspapers corroborated these accounts of the Assyrian genocide. The New York Times reported on 11 October that 12,000 Persian Christians had died of massacre, hunger, or disease; thousands of girls as young as seven had been raped or forcibly converted to Islam; Christian villages had been destroyed, and three-fourths of these Christian villages were burned to the ground. The Times of London was perhaps the first widely respected publication to document the fact that 250,000 Assyrians and Chaldeans eventually died in the Ottoman genocide of Christians, a figure which many journalists and scholars have subsequently accepted....

As the Earl of Listowel, speaking in the House of Lords on 28 November 1933, stated, ‘‘the Assyrians fought on our side during the war,’’ and made ‘‘enormous sacrifices,’’ having ‘‘lost altogether by the end of the War about two-thirds of their total number.’'....

About half of the Assyrian nation died of murder, disease, or exposure as refugees during the war, according to the head of the Anglican Church, which had a mission to the Assyrians.

In April 1915, after a number of failed Kurdish attempts, Ottoman Troops invaded Gawar, a region of Hakkari, and massacred the entire population. Prior to this, in October 1914, 71 Assyrian men of Gawar were arrested and taken to the local government center in Bashkala and killed.