For centuries, the Assyrian communities of the Ottoman Empire had endured hardship without disappearing. Their ancestors had ruled an ancient empire centered on Nineveh and Ashur. Now, in the early years of the twentieth century, they lived scattered across southeastern Anatolia, northern Mesopotamia, and northwestern Persia—some in high mountain villages, others in towns like Urmia, Mosul, Diyarbakir, and Mardin. Christian faith held them together.
They belonged to the Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church, and the Syriac Orthodox Church, tracing their roots to the first centuries of Christianity. In remote valleys, tribal leaders and patriarchs governed local affairs, and Ottoman rule barely reached many mountain districts. That freedom had a price. Christians paid extra taxes and lived under legal discrimination in an empire where Muslims held political and military power.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the empire had lost territory in Europe and the Balkans. Greece had broken away; Serbia and Bulgaria had gained independence. Russia threatened from the north. Ottoman officials turned their suspicion toward the Christian communities of Eastern Anatolia—Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians—fearing they might help Russian forces in an invasion.
During the Hamidian massacres of 1894 to 1896, hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed. Assyrian communities in Diyarbakir and Tur Abdin were also attacked. Villages were looted, churches destroyed, and many Assyrians died alongside their Armenian neighbors. The warning was visible: the older protections that had once allowed Christian communities to survive inside the empire were disappearing.
When the Young Turks seized power in 1908, the movement promised constitutional reform, equality, and modernization. Hope returned briefly. But after the Balkan Wars, millions of Muslim refugees poured into Anatolia, grieving and desperate for land. Ottoman officials tied Christian minorities to foreign enemies.
Reform and equality faded as the Committee of Union and Progress, led by figures like Mehmed Talat Pasha and Ismail Enver Pasha, promoted Turkish Muslim unity. Suspicion moved from the frontier into policy. On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. Within weeks, Europe was at war.
Late that year, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers beside Germany and Austria-Hungary. Russian forces advanced through the Caucasus, and Eastern Anatolia became a frontline region. Assyrian communities stood between two empires and opposing armies. By the end of 1914, food grew scarce, refugees filled towns, disease spread, and soldiers took over whole districts.
Then came Sarıkamış. In January 1915, Ottoman forces under Ismail Enver Pasha met Russian troops near the border and lost. Tens of thousands of Ottoman soldiers froze to death in the winter cold. The defeat left officials searching for blame.
They pointed at Armenians and other Christians, claiming those communities had helped Russia. No proof changed the outcome. A military failure became a charge against Christian civilians, and that charge became a justification for mass violence. Christian soldiers were disarmed first, stripped of the protection of their Ottoman uniforms, and sent into labor battalions, where many were later executed.
In April 1915, authorities arrested Armenian intellectuals across Constantinople. Violence against Christian communities widened. Assyrians faced different attacks from region to region, but the outcome often matched. Ottoman authorities, local militias, Kurdish tribal fighters, and irregular units joined the assaults.
In many places, villages vanished within days. In Hakkari, near the Persian border, Patriarch Shimun the Nineteenth Benjamin led the Assyrian communities. For years they had held neutrality between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. That protection broke.
Ottoman authorities declared the Hakkari Assyrians a security threat, and Kurdish tribal leaders pressed for military action. During spring and summer of 1915, Ottoman and Kurdish forces attacked mountain villages. Attackers burned entire settlements, and civilians fled with whatever they could carry. Roads and riverbanks held bodies left unburied.
Assyrian fighters held mountain positions with old rifles and limited ammunition, turning villages into makeshift fortresses. But each fallen settlement sent more refugees south toward Persia through the mountain passes. Thousands died on the journey from exhaustion, hunger, cold, and disease. Farther west, Tur Abdin—home to many Syriac Orthodox Assyrian communities with monasteries and villages that had stood for centuries—was already under attack.
Some people tried to negotiate; others handed over their weapons, hoping to prevent bloodshed. Those choices brought no protection. Attackers surrounded settlements around Midyat, Mardin, and Diyarbakir. Churches were looted, clergy killed, and Christian families disappeared from places where generations had lived.
Under the administration of Mehmed Rashid, governor of Diyarbakir province, killing spread across the province during 1915. Witnesses described armed groups moving from village to village, separating men first and executing them outside the settlements, then expelling, abducting, or killing women and children. American missionaries in Persia met refugees carrying the proof of these events. Their records survive.
They saw exhausted Assyrians arriving from the east, weak from hunger, marked by wounds, frostbite, or disease. Children came without parents or relatives. Some had lost entire families. The records described roads with corpses beside them and villages left empty after their inhabitants fled or died.
That evidence explained why so many people kept moving toward Urmia. By late 1915, hundreds of thousands of displaced people crowded around the city in northwestern Persia. Russian troops had entered the region, and refugees expected their presence to keep Ottoman forces away. But Russian units came and went.
Ottoman armies crossed the border. Kurdish tribal fighters raided exposed settlements while control of towns changed again and again. Crowded camps and villages ran out of food almost at once. Typhus and cholera spread through the displaced population, killing many without direct violence.
In 1917, Russia’s revolution broke the army holding parts of Persia. Soldiers deserted the front; Russian units withdrew or fell apart. Assyrian and Armenian communities lost one of their few defenders, and Ottoman forces and allied militias returned. Local victories could not change that exposure.
Assyrian fighters defeated Ottoman units in several engagements, but each success stayed temporary. In March 1918, Patriarch Shimun the Nineteenth Benjamin accepted a promised meeting with Simko Shikak, a Kurdish leader, to negotiate. The meeting became a trap. An ambush killed the patriarch and many companions traveling beside him.
Shimun had been a religious leader who held the scattered Assyrian communities together during the war. His death changed the meaning of every promise offered to refugees. Negotiation had ended in gunfire, and trust collapsed with it. Ottoman forces advanced on Urmia later that year.
Tens of thousands of Assyrians and Armenians moved south toward Hamadan beside retreating allied units. Families walked for weeks through heat, hunger, and repeated attacks. Bodies stayed along the roads. Children died of dehydration in their parents’ arms.
The elderly collapsed during the march while columns kept moving because they could not stop. Bandits and militias attacked again and again, taking supplies and abducting women. Sick people lay beside the route. Some estimates say thousands of refugees died during this single exodus.
By the end of the war, the Assyrian communities that had lived in southeastern Anatolia for centuries had largely vanished. Whole settlements disappeared. Survivors crossed borders, while others converted under pressure to remain alive. Estimates place Assyrian deaths during the genocide between 250,000 and 300,000.
Survivors called it Sayfo—the sword. The word preserved their memory of violence carried out face-to-face in villages and on roads. Some Muslim families hid Assyrians and risked their own lives. Others joined the killings or seized property.
Families carried both kinds of stories for generations. Diplomats, missionaries, and aid workers documented the crimes against Assyrians and Armenians. Their reports survived, but international protection did not follow. In 1918, the Ottoman Empire collapsed after its armies were defeated.
Britain and France divided former Ottoman territories through mandates and colonial agreements, drawing new borders across lands where ethnic and religious communities already lived. Assyrian survivors found themselves spread across several new states—Iraq, Syria, Iran, Soviet territory—with no single homeland. Allied wartime promises, which had encouraged Assyrian hopes tied to their cooperation against the Ottomans, were largely ignored. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk then led a Turkish nationalist movement against Allied occupation from 1919 to 1923, and violence against remaining Christian communities continued in several regions.
When the Republic of Turkey was established in 1923, surviving Assyrians had fled their ancestral districts or had been forced from them permanently. Across the border, displaced families found no lasting safety. British authorities recruited some men into the Assyrian Levies to defend British interests in Iraq during the 1920s and early 1930s. That service brought suspicion.
When Iraq gained independence in 1932, the position of Assyrian communities became more dangerous. In August 1933, Iraqi forces and irregular fighters moved toward Simale in northern Iraq. They attacked Assyrian civilians around the town. Hundreds died; the death toll may have reached thousands.
The war had ended years earlier, but the killings had not. Later, Raphael Lemkin studied the mass killings of Armenians and Assyrians while developing the concept that would become known as genocide. The link mattered. No state spoke for the Assyrians after the war.
Survivors had scattered across many countries, and their communities had been weakened by loss and displacement. Armenian survivors built strong diaspora communities and gradually gained broader international recognition. Assyrians had fewer people and no country to represent them abroad. Their history often disappeared inside wider accounts of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse.
Historical records about the Assyrians survived only in pieces: missionary reports, church ledgers, diplomatic files, survivor testimony. Many communities were gone, and the people who might have kept fuller local accounts had been killed or scattered. Turkish authorities described the deaths through wartime chaos, famine, disease, and civil conflict. Historians studying Ottoman archives reach a different conclusion, comparing official records, eyewitness accounts, and demographic change across Assyrian districts.
Their research identifies targeted violence against Christian minorities, including Assyrians. Political tension in the Middle East still shapes the dispute. Modern Turkey rejects the claim of deliberate genocide. Yet during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, several European parliaments issued recognitions, and more scholars now use the terms Assyrian genocide and Sayfo openly.
The evidence often begins with a church book, then an archive page, then one surviving voice. Activists and historians continue preserving survivor accounts of Sayfo.