Commemorating The Victims of a Great Tragedy - Assyrian Martyr's Day

Many of the stories I write here are reflections of my own story, as they mirror different aspects of my own life experience.   This one is more somber in tone due to the fact it deals with an issue that is close to my own heart and has been for the past 30 years - the Assyrian people and their history, which has been baptized in the blood of many innocent martyrs from among them.  Collectively, these martyrs are officially commemorated on August 7, which is Assyrian Martyr's Day, and thus I felt the need to say something about it. 

Over the past 30 or so years, I have gotten to know the Assyrians as my friends - I have many dear and close friends among them, including author/actress/activist Rosie Malek-Yonan, singer Linda George, Assyrian nationalist Sargon Dadesho, a couple of beautiful and intelligent Assyrian sisters by the name of Christmas and Rebecca Simon,  Assyrian-American pastor John Booko, and Assyrian author/activist Fred Aprim.  I will even be referencing some of the material as I write this today that they themselves have authored, and it is my hope that I can inform as many non-Assyrians as possible about these remarkable people and their great nation.  I also have another closeness to them as well - being a blood descendant of two prominent Byzantine-era Armenian families on my father's side of the family tree, I now identify as Armenian, and thus share a level of solidarity with my Assyrian friends, as in many cases they and the Armenians suffered many of the same atrocities at the same period of time.  The recognition of this tragedy needs to be made official, as it would be a great tribute to the many innocent martyrs of these atrocities over the past century.  And, that is why I make a point to commemorate Assyrian martyrs of all tragedies every year on August 7th myself. 

At this point, it is also worth mentioning (as well as I have recently learned myself) that as I write this it is Friday, August 3rd.  Another commemoration of a neighboring community is observed today, and that is of the Yezidi community.  The Yezidis are often lumped together with the Kurds, but are a religious community that pre-dates Islam by centuries.  The religion they practice has its roots in pre-Islamic Medo-Persian beliefs similar (but not quite synonymous) with the Zoroastrian religion.  Over the centuries, the Yezidis have appropriated some practices from both Christians and Muslims, but they are still a distinct religion not connected to either.  Although not Christians, the Yezidis have always lived peacefully among Armenians and Assyrians, and oftentimes suffered the same persecution with them, which has cemented a significant level of solidarity between the communities.  I have also gotten to know some Yezidis as well over the years, and the ones I have come to know as friends are wonderful people.  Therefore, today we remember their families who still are suffering under Islamic terrorism, as this day commemorates a major massacre against their community committed by the demonic hordes of ISIS in 2014. 

It is imperative that those of us who are Catholic Christians in particular always work to help communities like the Yezidis, Assyrians, and Armenians, and despite how "rosy" fake news networks such as CNN paint things (CNN is a vehicle for liberal bias as well as promoting the radical Islamist agenda, so they should not be taken seriously as actual news), much of this persecution still goes on even today - as recently as a few years ago, for instance, Armenians were targeted by Azerbaijani mobs and many were killed by those some mobs, and of course it doesn't need to be a reminder of how demonic and evil the beasts of ISIS were (and possibly still are).   Even in the US, the supposed land of "free speech," the Armenian Genocide is still denied while those who glorify it - notably a show called "The Young Turks" hosted by a Turkish-American blowhard named Cenk Uygur (whose name sounds like "Chunk Yogurt," and with his fat rear, it fits him well) as well as many of our own Congressional leadership (Steve Cohen, Sheila Jackson Lee, Eddie Bernice Johnson, and some others come to mind - they need to be voted out honestly) - have free reign to spread their anti-Armenian and anti-Christian propaganda on the "mainstream" airwaves.  That being said, let's now look at why the observance of Assyrian Martyr's Day is important, as well as what it commemorates.

Assyrian Martyr's Day is a day in which the Assyrian people commemorate the memories of all Assyrians who died as martyrs, including the Sayfo of 1915, committed by the godless Ottomans simultaneously with the massacre of a million and a half Armenians (commemorated April 24th) as well as an untold number of Anatolian Greeks (they have a commemoration day as well, although the date escapes me).   However, the date August 7th was chosen because of a specific incident that occurred 18 years later in 1933 in an Iraqi village called Simele, and it goes down in the history books as the notorious Simele Massacre.  Sargon Dadesho, in his book The Assyrian National Question (Modesto. CA:  Bet Nahrain, 1987) gives a summary description on page 134 as to what happened.  According to Dadesho's text, a Kurd who was given rank in the Iraqi forces by the name of Bakr Sidqi led a group of brigands to massacre over 3,000 Assyrians, and some of the atrocities were so heinous that those who witnessed them had to have a lot of intestinal fortitude to document them.  One such account, authored by Col. R.S. Stafford in his seminal 1935 work The Tragedy of the Assyrians (London:  George Allen and Unwin, 1935), is documented from testimonies he gleaned from female survivors.  The women he interviewed said that the Assyrians were rounded up in batches of 8-10 in trucks, driven outside the village, and then gunned down with machine guns by the "soldiers."  If the gunfire didn't work, the dead and dying were flattened by being ran over with trucks.  Although the Kurd Bakr Sidqi was the main perpetrator in this case, he had another willing accomplice in the person of Hikmet Beg Suleiman, the Iraqi Minister of the Interior who was a Turk by ethnicity, as well as being a sibling to Shevket Bey, one of the "Young Turks" who had years previous been involved in the execution of the Armenian Genocide.  Note here something else - like the Armenian and Assyrian Genocides in 1915, it is evident that the major perpetrators in the crimes were Turks and Kurds.  The assassination of the Assyrian Patriarch Mar Benyamin in 1918, as a matter of fact, was also carried out by a Kurd named Simkoo who acted as a hatchet-man for his "Young Turk" overlords.  This in no way implicates all Turks and Kurds, as many good souls among both also aided and helped victims of these genocides.  However, it is interesting that although the Simele Massacre was carried out by an Arab government, it was Turk and Kurd perpetrators who carried out the orders of their masters.  Simkoo and Bakr Sidqi were both Kurds, and both were immortalized as "heroes" by their respective regimes, yet both were also murderous and opportunistic butchers who are, I believe, burning in hell for their acts.  Simko and Sidqi are no better than Adolf Hitler, in other words.    However, the bigger issue here is also an injustice that was suffered by the Kurds as a people too - the Kurds were often used by both the Ottomans as well as successive Arab governments to do their "dirty work" for them, but those same governments would turn on the Kurds just as quickly when they had outlived their usefulness.  However, on the other side of that, you would think the Kurds would learn after all these years, and that makes an interesting question to ask on its own.   An example of this in fairly recent history was Saddam Hussein's dealings with the Kurds.  That would surely be a whole other subject at another time, as a lot of time could be spent on that. 

Bakr Sidqi (1890-1937)

The justice in this though was that in 1937, four years after he perpetrated the atrocities on the Assyrians of Simele, Sidqi was assassinated by Arab nationalists who seized power while he was standing in the garden of an air force base near Mosul.  As Sidqi had sown, so did he reap - he sowed violence and destruction, but was also taken down by it by his own "allies," who themselves were radical Arab nationalists who couldn't bear the thought of an "inferior" Kurd holding such power in their state.   Again, it proves my earlier premise - the Kurds were useful until they were arbitrarily deemed unuseful, and then they were disposed of.  Such was the case with Bakr Sidqi.  

As Fred Aprim notes in his book, Assyrians:  From Badr Khan to Saddam Hussein (Verdugo City, CA:  Pearlida Publishing, 2006) on page 166, Simele was premeditated, and he noted that the massacre that evolved at Simele was stage-set on three fronts, which were as follows:

1.  A flood of negative press sanctioned by the Iraqi government against Assyrians.

2.  A marginalization of prominent Assyrian nationalists such as the Patriarch Mar Eshai Shimun, Malik Yacu, and others.  Some years ago, I saw some of this nonsense (not unlike the way the American "fake news" paints conservatives today) in a book where the prominent Assyrian legend Agha Petros was demonized by a pro-Arabist author. 

3.  The manipulation and deception of certain Assyrian leaders (Aprim points out Malik Khoshaba in particular) to buy into the agenda they had - in other words, the old "divide and conquer" strategy of fragmenting a community.  

As Aprim also points out later, this also had the British diplomatic enterprise puppet-stringing in the background (it still happens with US diplomacy today too - Bill Clinton is a glaring example of that), in that Britain sought to denigrate and immobilize the Assyrian Levies (their militia at the time) in favor of the Arab armies of the Iraqi state.  However, the British were also quick to use the Assyrians where it benefitted British ambitions, such as several years later when the Levies were re-deployed to defend against Axis meddling among Arab nationalists (of which the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Husseini, was instrumental - he was a radical Islamist and a Hitler ally).  In looking at how both the Brits and Americans (and to a lesser degree the French) have handled international relations over the years, a lot of culpability needs to be assigned to Western governments for aiding and abetting oppressive regimes to commit genocides.  We still see it today in the way Washington kisses Ankara's butt by refusing to recognize the Armenian Genocide.  We also see it even among noted conservative authorities in the US, who think that the Kurds are our best chance for alliances against ISIS and other groups - one conservative authority who is a noted author and commentator, and whom I know personally having once gone to the same church with him, even said the Assyrians were not worth considering and that the Kurds should be given priority in negotiations.  However, while US policy is cowtowing to the Kurds, Kurdish brigands are still terrorizing Armenian and Assyrian villages and homes in the region.  This fact has not gone unnoticed in my conversations with Assyrian and Armenian friends - they are dumbfounded at how stupid our leadership in the West really is, and they also feel like they have been betrayed, and rightly so.   Of course, given the secularist (and increasingly anti-Christian) direction much of the West has been heading, this should come as no surprise;  like in Sudan for instance, the racism of "mainstream" American secularists is evident in a quote from South Sudanese activist Dr. Dominic Mohammed, who rightly observed this Western bias with the following question he posed in 1999:  "Are White Muslims of more value than Black Christians?"  Good question to ask, and it does get to the point.  It is the reason, I believe, that the US and Britain fail in recognizing the Armenian Genocide, as Turkey has a lot of money and the Armenians don't, so to the American politician Armenians mean little, even when they are being harassed and even killed by Islamic extremists.  And, the Kurds have more power, so why worry about the Assyrians - after all, my conservative acquaintance actually said that the Assyrians were "too fractured" to take seriously (he is wrong, of course) and that the Kurds may be a "better option" for alliances.  What my friend didn't say is that the Kurds have more access to certain resources the US finds valuable, so that is why our leadership kisses their butts.  Any rate, enough about that.  

Getting back to the Simele Massacre, the events are marked as beginning on August 7, 1933, but the worst atrocities actually took place four days later, starting on the 11th, which is the general consensus of most of the writers I have referenced.  Some of these atrocities are so vile, and so disgusting, that it is a challenge to even mention them.  For instance, priests were savagely mutilated even after they had been murdered, and some Iraqi "soldiers" even ripped open the wombs of pregnant Assyrian women with bayonet points (William Warda, Assyrians Beyond the Fall of Nineveh.  self-published, 2013. p. 272), effectively aborting the babies in a way that would make Margaret Sanger proud.  For their "efforts," Warda notes, the butchers were made heroes and even had monuments erected in their honor in Baghdad and Mosul, and the decapitated heads of slain Assyrians were put on display as trophies.  Sick, wretched, and horrid, and I imagine for some it was like living the nightmare of the 1915 Sayfo, which many of them had survived, all over again.  Ironically, at around the same time some 2000 miles away, a maniac named Hitler had assumed power in Germany, and was enacting the Nuremburg Laws which would culminate in the death camps of Auschwitz, where many of the Assyrians' cousins the Jews would be slaughtered in similar fashion.  Ironically, Hitler also used the same tactics and fronts that Aprim noted earlier that the Iraqi regime used against the Assyrians to desensitize the German people against the Jews, and it is believed that the Ottomans and their "Young Turk" successors used similar tactics to villify Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians many years earlier.  And, that leads to a discussion on that subject.

The main ingredient in cooking up a genocide against a group of people is dehumanization.  Spreading propaganda against a community is a sure way to stir up hatred against that community, and the worst perpetrators of genocide in history (the Young Turks, the Nazis, the 1930's Arab nationalists who ruled Iraq, and the Sudanese government in recent times) all utilized the same tactics.  By stripping people of the dignity of their God-endowed personhood, it makes the job of exterminating them easier.  Many former Nazis who operated the gas chambers at places like Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen have testified that to them, killing Jews was like exterminating rats or cockroaches, which resulted by the conditioning and constant propaganda the Nazis pumped on a continual basis at the German people.  In other words, genocide becomes a moral imperative and nothing is seen about it that is bad.  When a society reaches that level of callousness, it is doomed for destruction.  It is one reason why today the Islamic world is still so backward, and also why Germany was pretty much destroyed during the Second World War.  We have people in the US today (Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and others) who spout similar rhetoric - they paint their opponents as "evil" and encourage violence to silence or even destroy those who oppose their agendas.  Antifa in the US is, therefore, no different than murderers like Bakr Sidqi or Adolf Hitler, and this is why we as a nation need to be vigilant.  It is also why we should really take seriously what happened to many innocent Assyrians at Simele, or Armenians during the Genocide, or Jews in the Holocaust, because if we don't watch and learn from such events, they could end up happening outside our own door.  As Christians, it is even more of an imperative, in that we believe that humanity is the pinnacle of God's creation and therefore the sanctity of human life is a cardinal virtue we must uphold.  I have preached enough for today, so now let's have some concluding thoughts.

The burning of Assyrian bodies after the massacres

Decapitated heads of murdered Assyrians on display as trophies in Mosul in 1933.

The carnage of Simele, 1933.

The Assyrians are a fascinating and ancient people with a rich past, but it is also a past which has been stained with a lot of the blood of their people.  It is important to commemorate the memories of those innocent victims of injustice, and to remember that these are also our brethren - Assyrians are fellow Christians, and as part of the extended Christian family they need us too.  Policies of bureaucracies like the US be damned - we need to start acting on a higher law rather than being so damned pragmatic about what "we can benefit," and it is time we stop promoting our selfish interests in the international arena and instead stand up for the common good, which is the preservation and protection of those who are oppressed as Assyrians and others are in the Middle East.  As August 7th approaches this coming Tuesday, let us please keep that in mind.  By standing up for the Assyrians and others, we do ultimately do what is best for us as well, because those who oppress and persecute Assyrians today may become our oppressors tomorrow, and then what will we do?  May we remember all those martyrs - Assyrian, Armenian, Yezidi, and others - and may their rest be eternal and may Light Perpetual shine upon them.  Thank you, and will see you again soon. 

"The rest of the story is pointless. I said so long to the young Assyrian and left the shop. I walked across town, four miles, to my room on Carl Street. I thought about the whole business: Assyria and this Assyrian, Theodore Badal, learning to be a barber, the sadness of his voice, the hopelessness of his attitude. This was months ago, in August, but ever since I have been thinking about Assyria, and I have been wanting to say something about Theodore Badal, a son of an ancient race, himself youthful and alert, yet hopeless. Seventy thousand Assyrians, a mere seventy thousand of that great people, and all the others quiet in death and all the greatness crumbled and ignored, and a young man in America learning to be a barber, and a young man lamenting bitterly the course of history."  - William Saroyan, "Seventy Thousand Assyrians"