The Simele massacre (Syriac: ܦܪܲܡܬܵܐ ܕܣܸܡܹܠܹܐ, romanized: Premta d'Simele, Arabic: مذبحة سميل, romanized: maḏbaḥat Simīl), also known as the Assyrian affair, was a massacre committed by the Kingdom of Iraq under the leadership of Kurdish army general Bakr Sidqi. The massacre was committed in August 1933 against the Assyrian population of Iraq in and around the village of Simele.
Although primarily known for the attacks in the village of Simele, 54 villages in total are said to have been targeted during the four day period of the massacre, primarily in the Zakho and Simele Districts (now in the modern Duhok Governorate).
The massacre is known partly for having imprinted the memory of persecution on the modern Assyrian identity, while also being regarded as the turning point for the Assyrian naming dispute. Raphael Lemkin's coining of the term genocide was influenced by the events of the massacre.
Background
Assyrians of the mountains
The majority of the Assyrians affected by the massacres were adherents of the Church of the East (often incorrectly dubbed Nestorian; later known as the Assyrian Church of the East), who originally inhabited the mountainous Hakkari and Barwari regions covering parts of the modern provinces of Hakkâri, Şırnak and Van in Turkey and the Dohuk Governorate in Iraq, with a population ranging between 75,000 and 150,000. Most of these Assyrians were massacred during the 1915 Assyrian genocide, at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, while the rest endured two winter marches to Urmia in 1915 and to Hamadan in 1918.
Many Assyrians were relocated by the British to refugee camps in Baquba and later to Habbaniyah, and in 1921 some were enlisted in the Assyrian Levies, a military force under British command. In 1924, in response to attacks on Assyrian civilians, soldiers of the Assyrian Levies rampaged through Kirkuk, killing approximately 300 Muslims. Most Hakkari Assyrians were resettled after 1925 in a cluster of villages in northern Iraq. Some of the villages where the Assyrians settled were leased directly by the government, while others belonged to Kurdish landlords who had the right to evict them at any time.
Iraqi independence and crisis
During the Ottoman Empire until its partition in the 20th century, Iraq was made up of three provinces: Mosul Vilayet, Baghdad Vilayet, and Basra Vilayet. These three provinces were joined into one Kingdom under the nominal rule of King Faisal by the British after the region became a League of Nations mandate, administered under British control, with the name "State of Iraq". Britain granted independence to the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq in 1932, on the urging of King Faisal, though the British retained military bases and transit rights for their forces; the Assyrian Levies continued to be stationed in Iraq.
Iraqi nationalists perceived the Assyrian Levies to be a British proxy force that allowed Britain to maintain influence in post-independence Iraq; soldiers of the Levies had not been granted Iraqi citizenship until 1924. The Assyrian Levies received higher pay than their counterparts in the Iraqi military, further increasing resentment towards them. Iraqi nationalists believed the British motive behind raising and maintaining the Levies was to encourage the Assyrians to become independent from Iraq and for other ethnic minorities such as the Kurds to follow their example. The Iraqi military also harbored a hostile attitude towards the Assyrian Levies as the latter had in conjunction with British forces suppressed the Ahmed Barzani revolt after the former had failed to do so.
The end of the British Mandate of Iraq caused considerable unease among the Assyrians, many of whom felt betrayed by the British. For them, any treaty with the Iraqis had to take into consideration their desire for an autonomous position similar to the Ottoman Millet system. The Iraqis, on the other hand felt that the Assyrians' demands were, alongside Kurdish disturbances in the north, a British conspiracy to divide Iraq by agitating its various minorities against the central government.
Assyrian demands for autonomy
With Iraqi independence, the new Assyrian spiritual-temporal leader, Shimun XXI Eshai (Catholicos Patriarch of the Church of the East), demanded an autonomous Assyrian homeland within Iraq, seeking support from the United Kingdom and pressing his case before the League of Nations in 1932. His followers planned to resign from the Assyrian Levies and to re-group as a militia and concentrate in the north, creating a de facto Assyrian enclave.
In spring 1933, Malik Yaqo, a former Levies officer, was engaged in a propaganda campaign on behalf of Assyrian Patriarch Shimun XXI Eshai (or Mar Shimun), trying to persuade Assyrians not to apply for Iraqi nationality or accept the settlement offered to them by the central government. Yaqo was accompanied by 200 armed men, which was seen as an act of defiance by the Iraqi authorities, while causing distress among the Kurds. The Iraqi government started sending troops to the Dohuk region in order to intimidate Yaqu and dissuade Assyrians from joining his cause.
In June 1933, Shimun XXI Eshai was invited to Baghdad for negotiations with Rashid Ali al-Gaylani's government but was detained there after refusing to relinquish temporal authority. He would eventually be exiled to Cyprus.
Massacres
Clashes at Dirabun
On 21 July 1933, more than 600 Assyrians, led by Yaqo, crossed the border into Syria in hope of receiving asylum from the French Mandate of Syria. They were, however, disarmed and refused asylum, and were subsequently given light arms and sent back to Iraq on 4 August. They then decided to surrender themselves to the Iraqi Army. While crossing the Tigris in the Assyrian village of Dirabun, a clash erupted between the Assyrians and an Iraqi Army brigade. Despite the advantage of heavy artillery, the Iraqis were driven back to their military base in Dirabun. The Assyrians, convinced that the Iraqi army had targeted them deliberately, attacked an army barracks with little success. They were driven back to Syria upon the arrival of Iraqi airplanes. The Iraqi Army lost 33 soldiers during the fighting while the Assyrian irregulars took fewer casualties.
Historians do not agree on who started the clashes at the border. The British Administrative Inspector for Mosul, Lieutenant-colonel R. R. Stafford, wrote that the Assyrians had no intention of clashing with the Iraqis, while the Iraqi historian Khaldun Husry claims that it was Yaqo's men who provoked the army at Dirabun. Husry supported the propaganda rumors, which circulated in the Iraqi nationalist newspapers, of the Assyrians mutilating the bodies of the killed Iraqi soldiers, further enraging the Iraqi public against the Assyrians.
Beginning of the massacres
Even though all military activities ceased by 6 August 1933, exaggerated stories of atrocities committed by the Assyrians at Dirabun and anti-Christian propaganda gained currency while rumors circulated that the Christians were planning to blow up bridges and poison drinking water in major Iraqi cities. The Iraqi Army, led by Bakr Sidqi, an experienced brigadier general and Iraqi nationalist, moved north in order to crush the Assyrian revolt. Iraqi troops started executing every Assyrian male found in the mountainous Bekher region between Zakho and Duhok starting from 8 August 1933. Assyrian civilians were transported in military trucks from Zakho and Dohuk to uninhabited places, in batches of eight or ten, where they were shot with machine guns and run over by heavy armoured cars to make sure no one survived.
Looting of villages
While these killings were taking place, nearby Kurdish, Arab and Yazidi tribes were encouraged to loot Assyrian villages. Kurdish tribes of Gulli, Sindi and Selivani were encouraged by the mayor of Zakho to loot villages to the northeast of Simele. Most women and children from those villages took refuge in Simele and Dohuk.
On 9 August, the Arab tribes of Shammar and Jubur started crossing to the east bank of the Tigris and raiding Assyrian villages on the plains to the south of Dohuk. They were mostly driven by the loss of a large part of their own livestock to drought in the previous years. More than 60 Assyrian villages were looted. While women and children were mostly allowed to take refuge in neighboring villages, men were sometimes rounded up and handed over to the army, by whom they were shot. Some villages were completely burned down and most of them were later inhabited by Kurds.
Massacre in Simele
The town of Simele became the last refuge for Assyrians fleeing from the looted villages. The mayor of Zakho arrived with a military force on 8 and 9 August to disarm the city. During that time thousands of refugees flocked around the police post in the town, where they were told by officials that they would be safe under the Iraqi flag. 10 August saw the arrival of Kurdish and Arab looters who, undeterred by the local police, took away the freshly cut wheat and barley. During the night of 10–11 August, the Arab inhabitants of Simele joined the looting. The Assyrian villagers could only watch as their Arab neighbors drove their flocks before them.
On 11 August the villagers were ordered to leave the police post and return to their homes, which they began to do with some reluctance. As they were heading back Iraqi soldiers in armoured cars arrived, and the Iraqi flag flying over the police post was pulled down. Without warning or obvious provocation, the troops began to fire indiscriminately into the defenseless Assyrians. Ismael Abbawi Tohalla, the commanding officer, then ordered his troops not to target women.
Stafford described the ensuing massacre:
A cold blooded and methodical massacre of all the men in the village then followed, a massacre which for the black treachery in which it was conceived and the callousness with which it was carried out, was as foul a crime as any in the blood stained annals of the Middle East. The Assyrians had no fight left in them, partly because of the state of mind to which the events of the past week had reduced them, largely because they were disarmed. Had they been armed it seems certain that Ismail Abawi Tohalla and his bravos would have hesitated to take them on in fair fight. Having disarmed them, they proceeded with the massacre according to plan. This took some time. Not that there was any hurry, for the troops had the whole day ahead of them. Their opponents were helpless and there was no chance of any interference from any quarter whatsoever. Machine gunners set up their guns outside the windows of the houses in which the Assyrians had taken refuge, and having trained them on the terror stricken wretches in the crowded rooms, fired among them until not a man was left standing in the shambles. In some other instance the blood lust of the troops took a slightly more active form, and men were dragged out and shot or bludgeoned to death and their bodies thrown on a pile of dead.
In his depiction of the massacre, Mar Shimun states:
Girls were raped and made to march naked before Iraqi commanders. Children were run over by military cars. Pregnant women were bayonetted. Children were flung in the air and pierced on to the points of bayonets. Holy books were used for the burning of the massacred.
On 13 August, Bakr Sidqi moved his troops to Alqosh, where he planned to inflict a further massacre on the Assyrians who found refuge there.
Targeted villages
Targeted villages
- Ala Keena
- Aloka
- Badalliya
- Baderden
- Bagerey
- Bakhitmey
- Bameri
- Barcawra
- Baroshkey
- Basorik
- Bastikey
- Benaringee
- Betafrey
- Betershy
- Bidari
- Biswaya
- Carbeli
- Chem Jehaney
- Dair Kishnik
- Dairke
- Derjendy
- Fishkhabour
- Garvaly
- Gereban
- Gond Naze
- Harkonda
- Idleb
- Kaberto
- Karpel
- Karshen
- Kaserezden
- Kerry
- Khalata
- Kharab Koli
- Kharsheniya
- Kitba
- Korekavana
- Kowashey
- Lazga
- Majel Makhte
- Mansouriya
- Mawani
- Qasr Yazdin
- Rabibyia
- Rekawa
- Sar Shorey
- Sezary
- Shekhidra
- Sidzari
- Sirchuri
- Spendarook
- Tal Zet
- Tel Khish
- Zeniyat
The main campaign lasted until 16 August 1933, but violent raids on Assyrians were being reported up to the end of the month. The campaign resulted in one third of the Assyrian population of Iraq fleeing to Syria.
Aftermath
On 18 August 1933, Iraqi troops entered Mosul, where they were given an enthusiastic reception by its Muslim inhabitants. Triumphant arches were erected and decorated with melons pierced with daggers, symbolizing the heads of murdered Assyrians. The crown prince Ghazi himself came to the city to award 'victorious' colors to those military and tribal leaders who participated in the massacres and the looting. Anti-Christian feeling was at its height in Mosul, and the Christians of the city were largely confined to their homes during the whole month in fear of further action by the frenzied mob.