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EDUCATE & COMMEMORATE
Assyrian Genocide
in Modern History
We are proud to partner with the Assyrian American Association of Southern California, the Assyrian American Cultural Organization, and the Centre for Canadian-Assyrian Relations to raise awareness, promote accountability, and work to ensure victims access justice, reparations, and support.
This document provides a summary of five major events in modern history during which Assyrians were subjected to genocide and ethnic cleansing: The Massacre of Assyrians at Hakkari (1843); the Assyrian Genocide (1914-1923); the Simele Massacre (1933); the Soriya Massacre (1969); and the more recent genocide and ethnic cleansing campaigns at the hands of ISIS (2014-2015). It also contains recommendations for further reading on these events.
"I am determined to record the martyrdom of a small people, the most worthy of interest yet at the same time the most abandoned, arising out of a great empire of the world’s most ancient civilization, whose country, like Armenia, was the stage for Turkish abominations in which men were tragically murdered, women, children, and the aged deported into the desert, pillaged, martyred and subjected to the worst atrocities.
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This people is the Assyro-Chaldean people."
Joseph Naayem, Les Assyro-Chaldéens
et les Arméniens massacrés par les Turcs (1920)
The Simele Massacre, known to Assyrians as Pramta d’Simele, was a massacre committed by the armed forces of the Iraqi state (founded in 1932) systematically targeting the indigenous Assyrian population in northern Iraq in August 1933. The term is not only used to describe the massacre in Simele, but the wider genocidal campaign that took place across more than 100 Assyrian villages in Nohadra (Dohuk) and Nineveh (Mosul) that led to the death of as many as 6,000 Assyrians.
"I saw & heard many horrible things in the Great War, but what I saw in Simele is beyond human imagination."
— From a secret report of a British eyewitness in the service of the Iraqi Government, 1933
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