It’s Time to Unite: A Brief History and a Message to Our Assyro-Aramean Nation

For more than a century, our nation has been a card in other people’s wars. Empires, kings, presidents and militias have picked us up when they needed us, used us, and dropped us when the fighting was over. Each time we were given empty promises. Each time we were left to bury our dead by the thousands.

Whether we call ourselves Syriac, Aramean, Assyrian or Chaldean, the message is the same: We have to put an end to the tribalism in our nation. This article shows, through several accounts, how we were used and slaughtered from pre-Sayfo times to Syria and Iraq today, and it ends with a message to all of us.

Pre-Sayfo tragedies#

All of us grew up hearing stories about Sayfo. I remember seeing my grandmother with tears in her eyes as she gave a speech about the horrors her parents and others had to go through. I have heard countless stories from my parents, acquaintances, priests and others. These stories have always moved me in a way that’s indescribable. However, as much as we honour Sayfo and talk about it, it never feels like enough.

But Sayfo didn’t come out of nowhere. Before I get to the genocide, I want to go back further, to showcase that hatred against our nation didn’t start with the Ottomans. And it was never only against one group, such as Arameans, Assyrians or Chaldeans. It was because of our collective identity and our religion. The persecution started in the seventh century, when the invading Arab armies took our land and made us second-class people. After that the rulers and empires changed. But for us it ended the same way, with burned monasteries and empty villages.

For fourteen centuries, they have always found a way to come for us. Below are a few of those massacres that happened before Sayfo.

Alqosh, 1832#

In March 1832, Soran Kurds raided the plains east of Mosul to avenge a Kurdish chieftain killed by Yezidis. They reached Alqosh and massacred its people thinking they were Yezidis. Accounts put the victims at between 272 and 367. Seven priests were among them. Both Hnanisho, a patriarchal vicar, and monk Gabriel Dambo were killed too. They sacked the town, robbed and looted the survivors and destroyed the tomb of the prophet Nahum. Just four years earlier, a plague had already devastated Alqosh and had taken 700 of its people.

The killing only stopped when Joseph Audo, the metropolitan of Amadiya, convinced the Kurdish leader that they were law-abiding “Syrians” and not Yezidis. By then the Kurds had already stripped and humiliated him.¹

Hamidian massacres#

Between 1894 and 1896, the government of Sultan Abdul Hamid II carried out a wave of massacres across the empire. They were aimed at the Armenians, and somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 of them were killed. In places like Diyarbakir the killing spread to every Christian, and according to one source from the time, up to 25,000 Arameans and Assyrians died alongside them.²

Sayfo: the sword, 1914 to 1918#

Then came the greatest tragedy: Sayfo, the genocide that every child of our nation has heard about from their elders. Every tear our elders shed while telling us these stories is part of how we make sure the victims are never forgotten. During the First World War, Ottoman troops and mostly Kurdish tribes swept through our villages in Tur Abdin, Hakkari, Diyarbakir and across the border in Urmia. Men were shot, women and children were driven into the mountains and deserts, pregnant women’s bellies were torn open, and whole villages disappeared. Historians estimate that 250,000 to 300,000³ of our people were killed, alongside the Armenian and Greek genocides of the same years.

Unity and tragedies#

Before Sayfo, our people numbered somewhere around 500,000 to 600,000.

Our people never lived apart. In Jezire, near Azakh, the Christians were Syriac Orthodox, Chaldeans, Protestants and Armenians. Mardin was home to Armenian Catholics, Syriac Catholics, Chaldeans, Protestants and Syriac Orthodox, all in one town. In Harput, Syriac Orthodox and Armenian families intermarried. The Ottoman officials knew exactly who was who, and it made no difference. In July 1915 the German ambassador reported that Reshid Bey, the governor of Diyarbakir, had started “a systematic extermination of the Christian population of his jurisdiction without distinction of race or confession.” On a single night in June 1915, more than 400 Armenian, Syriac Catholic, Chaldean and Protestant leaders from Mardin were taken away and killed.⁴

In 1915 none of that mattered. Armenians and Assyrians in these places were treated with the same brutality. Men were killed, women and children were raped, and whole communities were driven out on death marches. The killers did not stop to ask whether a family was Syriac Orthodox, Chaldean or Church of the East. Whatever our denomination, they treated us all the same.⁵

If we were all killed the same way, why are we still trying to separate ourselves?

The tenacity of our nation#

Despite everything, our lionhearted nation remained resilient. Brave Assyrian and Aramean villagers organized and defended themselves, repelling multiple sieges laid by the Kurdish tribes. The village of Ayn Wardo sustained a siege for 52 days ending in an epic victory that is still remembered today.⁶ And I must mention the villagers of Beth Zabday holding off Ottoman forces and allied Kurdish tribes for months.⁷

In Hakkari, Patriarch Mar Shimun Benyamin led his people into an alliance with Russia, which had promised protection. Then the Russian Revolution came in 1917 and the Russian army went home.⁸

In March 1918, the Kurdish chieftain Simko Shikak invited Mar Shimun to talks, then had him shot dead as he left the meeting. Tens of thousands of Assyrians fled Urmia on foot toward the British lines, and many died on the road.⁹ Again our nation remained strong and Assyrians fought back alongside the heroic Agha Petros.

After the war, the allies remembered us briefly. The Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 promised safeguards for the “Assyro-Chaldeans.” Three years later, the Treaty of Lausanne replaced it and our name was gone.¹⁰ We had fought on the winning side and were left with nothing. That wasn’t the first time we were used and forgotten. It was not the last.

After Sayfo: a century of being used#

Simele, 1933#

The survivors from Hakkari who reached Iraq became soldiers fighting alongside the British. Assyrians started joining the Iraqi Levies in 1922 and by 1928 the Levies were made up almost entirely of Assyrians, which earned them the nickname “the Assyrian Levies.” The Assyrians were known for their loyalty and their experienced soldiers. They fought and helped the British in countless engagements. In 1932 Britain handed Iraq its independence and walked away, leaving the Levies and their families with no guarantees.¹¹

One year later, in August 1933, the Iraqi army under Bakr Sidqi and armed tribesmen attacked Assyrian villages around Simele. Estimates of the dead range from about 600 in British reports to around 3,000 in Assyrian accounts. Our patriarch was stripped of his citizenship and exiled. The lawyer Raphael Lemkin later pointed to Simele when he developed the very idea of genocide. We mark 7 August as Assyrian Martyrs Day because of it.¹²

Syria under the Baath: The struggle under suppression#

Under the Baath, we were pushed out of the picture. Syria was rebuilt on a hard Arab nationalism that left no room for us to exist. I can say this from experience, because I lived in Syria until 2016. Every school day started with the Baath chants, “One Arab nation with an eternal mission,” and every child had to repeat them from their very first day. I never really understood what I was saying when I was a kid, but we had no choice. Our history books did the rest. They called our empires Arab and arabized anything that might have given us a sense of who we were. The only time Assyrians appeared in the curriculum, until even that was dropped under Bashar, was in a lesson on the Simele massacre in Iraq, and it painted the victims as traitors to the Arab state, as if their massacre had been necessary. Members of the Assyrian Democratic Organization who spoke up were harassed, arrested and tortured.¹³

Public schools never taught us our language.¹⁴ Thankfully, we could still learn it in Sunday school and, from what I saw myself, in private schools too. That is where my sense of a distinct identity first took shape. My parents didn’t speak Aramaic, but they did everything they could to teach me who we are. My father is of Aramean descent and an active member of the Syriac Orthodox Church. He taught me about our western Assyro-Aramean tradition, took me to church, and told me the story of King Abgar V and how our nation was the first to accept Christianity. He also signed me up for the church band, which I loved, and where we always sang our traditional hymns and songs. My mother is Chaldean, and she taught me about our eastern Assyro-Aramean tradition: how the Chaldean Church began, and how Chaldeans and Assyrians are one and the same people.

The Syrian civil war: The emergence of Christian “protectors”#

When the war came, everyone suddenly wanted the Christians. Assad called himself our protector, but that protection was mostly for show. He needed the West to see him as the secular leader standing between the minorities and the jihadists. When ISIS and al-Nusra killed our people and emptied our villages in the Khabur region, he turned our suffering into proof that only he could keep us safe.
The Kurdish-led administration in the northeast played the same card. It forced its own curriculum on our schools and started calling land that has been ours for thousands of years Kurdish, while it showed off its Aramean and Assyrian partners to win sympathy in the West and among Christians abroad.
The numbers tell the rest. Before 2011, somewhere between 1.0 and 1.5 million Christians¹⁵ lived in Syria. Today the estimates around 300,000¹⁶, and nobody can count us properly anymore, because so many of us are simply gone. When the new government signed its deal with the Kurdish-led SDF in March 2025, the Kurds were named and their rights were promised.¹⁷ Our language, spoken in this land long before Arabic arrived, did not get a single line.

Iraq under Saddam: the name game#

In Iraq, the Baath regime went further. In the censuses of 1977 and 1987, Assyrians were made to register as Arabs or Kurds.¹⁸ Anyone who insisted on being Assyrian could be left off the list. During the Anfal campaign of 1988, Assyrian villages and churches in the north were destroyed alongside Kurdish ones.¹⁹

Saddam also knew that a divided people is easier to rule. In 1979, the priest of Sacred Heart, a Chaldean church in Detroit, wrote to congratulate him on becoming president. Saddam answered with money: $250,000 for the church, and another $200,000 when he heard it was in debt.²⁰ In return, he was handed a key to the city of Detroit. At home, he kept Tariq Aziz, a Chaldean, by his side as deputy prime minister and later as foreign minister. The same regime that forced Assyrians to register as Arabs or Kurds was happy to reward Chaldeans. Saddam saw a chance to split Chaldeans from Assyrians, and he took it.

A message to our nation#

Whether you call yourself Aramean, Syriac, Assyrian or Chaldean: this article is a wake-up call. This is meant for those who lead us: our patriarchs and bishops, our parties and our organizations. You have the voice and the means. Use them to bring us together, not to keep us apart.
Look at the stories above and read well into them. Some of us have lived them. The Ottoman and Kurdish sword did not ask which church we prayed in. The Iraqi army at Simele did not check whether a village was Chaldean or Assyrian. ISIS and Nusra did not spare the Khabur because its people used one name instead of another. We love to focus on our differences while our enemies have always seen us as one people. Only we seem to be blind to that fact and easily forget about it.

In times like this, we need each other more than anyone else. We have to wake up and see the suffering of our nation. There’s a deep sorrow and grief in the heart of every refugee and every survivor of the Baath era, just like the grief in the hearts of the Sayfo survivors. A grief so deep it cannot be put into words. Every generation has seen the horrors and watched our nation slowly bleed to death.
Our children will grow up in a place where they have no connection to our ancestral homeland, and that is how, slowly but surely, our culture will disappear. I’m not saying that we should refuse to belong in the diaspora we live in now, but we should unite to return to our homeland, to the soil of Mesopotamia that we are all tied to.

We speak the same language, we celebrate the same feasts, sing the same hymns at church and bury our dead with the same prayers. We are cousins, families and neighbors. We have had the same struggle for centuries, and we always get punished for having the same blood that we try to distance ourselves from.

We keep arguing about names while there is hardly a household without an Aramean married to an Assyrian or a Chaldean married to an Assyrian. Can we even call those mixed marriages? They are marriages within one family, because that is what we are. That’s what we have always been. We argue while the vast majority of Westerners don’t even know the slightest thing about our nation. Most only know us when someone mentions the language Christ spoke. And I am not blaming anyone but ourselves and our own tribalism.

So it is time to rise. My brothers and sisters, we are in grave danger, and I do not think those who keep dividing us by name understand how close we are to disappearing. But it’s time to work out our differences and remember who we truly are: a nation of fierce lions and a beacon of knowledge, culture and resilience that has survived for centuries in a sea of terror and hatred. Before that, we were a nation that shaped the ancient world and ruled it. We were the pioneers who built some of the first great empires the world ever knew.
Remember who you are, my brothers and sisters, and what we are capable of. We have to give everything to keep our nation alive.

That means working together, across churches, across countries, across the old arguments, and, most importantly, bringing our people in the diaspora closer together toward one goal: Beth Nahrin, the land between the rivers, our ancestral homeland. A place where we govern ourselves. A place where our children can grow up safe, learn our customs, pray in our churches and speak our language in schools and cities, not only in a few small villages. A place to go back to, not only a place to remember. We are one people, Suraye: the nation of the Assyro-Arameans.