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The Simele massacre (, ), 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 against the Assyrian people population of Iraq in and around the village of Simele in August 1933.
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 District and Simele District which are now in the modern Duhok Governorate. The legacy of the massacre is known partly for imprinting the memory of persecution on modern Assyrian identity, while also being regarded as the turning point for the Assyrian naming dispute due to the responses of the Chaldean Catholic and Syriac Orthodox churches. Raphael Lemkin's coining of the term genocide was influenced by the events of the massacre.
Many of them 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, which participated in the Kirkuk Massacre of 1924 of Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen during the ongoing revolts in the British Mandate of Mesopotamia. 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.
Britain granted independence to the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq in 1932,Ongsotto et al. Asian History Module-based Learning Ii' 2003 Ed. p69. [1] on the urging of King Faisal, though the British retained , local militia in the form of Iraq Levies, and transit rights for their forces.
From Iraqi nationalists' point of view, the Assyrian Levies were British proxies to be used by their 'masters' to destroy the new Iraqi state, whose independence the British had consistently opposed. Under British protection, the Assyrian Levies had not become Iraqi citizens until 1924. The British allowed their Assyrian auxiliary troops to retain their arms after independence and granted them special duty and privileges, guarding military air installations and receiving higher pay than the Iraqi Arab recruits. The nationalists believed the British were hoping for the Assyrians to destroy Iraq's internal cohesion by becoming independent and by inciting others such as the Kurds to follow their example. In addition, elements of the Royal Iraqi Army resented the British and the Assyrians for having recently caused them to lose face very badly. This was because the British Army and Assyrian Levies had succeeded in defeating Kurdish revolts after the Royal Iraqi Army had tried and failed.
The end of the British Mandate of Iraq caused considerable unease among the Assyrians, who felt betrayed by the British Empire. 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 the Kurdish disturbances in the north, a conspiracy by British colonialists to divide and rule Iraq by agitating its various minorities against the central government.
In spring 1933, Malik Yaqo, a former Iraq 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.
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 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.
The Iraqi Army, led by Bakr Sidqi, an experienced brigadier general and Iraqi nationalist, moved north in order to crush the Assyrian revolt. The Iraqi forces 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.
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.
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:
In his depiction of the massacre, Mar Shimun states:
The official Iraqi account—that the Assyrian casualties were sustained during a short battle with Kurdish and Arab tribes—has been discredited by all historians. Khaldun Husry claims that the mass killing was not premeditated and that the responsibility lies on the shoulders of Ismael Abbawi, a junior officer in the army.
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.
The Iraqi Army later paraded in the streets of Baghdad in celebration of its victories. Bakr Sidqi was promoted; he later led Iraq's first military coup and became prime minister.
Immediately after the massacre and the repression of the alleged Assyrian uprising, the Iraqi government demanded a conscription bill. Non-Assyrian Iraqi tribesmen offered to serve in the Iraqi army in order to counter the Assyrians. In late August, the government of Mosul demanded that the central government 'ruthlessly' stamp out the rebellion, eliminate all foreign influence in Iraqi affairs, and take immediate steps to enact a law for compulsory military service. The next week, 49 Kurdish tribal chieftains joined in a pro-conscription telegram to the government, expressing thanks for punishing the 'Assyrian insurgents', stating that a "nation can be proud of itself only through its power, and since evidence of this power is the army," requesting compulsory military service.
Rashid Ali al-Gaylani presented the bill to the parliament. His government fell, however, before conscription was enacted; Jamil al-Midfai's government did so in February 1934.
The massacres and looting had a deep psychological impact on the Assyrians. Stafford reported their low morale upon arrival in Alqosh:
Because of the massacre, around 6,200 Assyrians left the Nineveh Plains immediately for the neighboring French Mandate of Syria, and were later joined by 15,000 refugees the following years. They concentrated in the Jazira region and built a number of villages on the banks of the Khabur River.
King Faisal, who had recently returned to Iraq from a medical vacation, was under great physical stress during the crisis. His health deteriorated even more during the hot summer days in Baghdad; the British chargé d'affaires described meeting him in his pajamas as he sat in his bed on 15 August, denying that a massacre had been committed in Simele. Faisal left Iraq again on 2 September 1933, seeking a cooler climate in London. He died five days later in Bern, Switzerland.
Mar Shimun, who had been detained since June 1933, was forced into exile along with his extended family, despite initial British reluctance. He was flown on an RAF plane to Cyprus on 18 August 1933, and to the United States in 1949, forcing the head of the Assyrian Church of the East to relocate to Chicago, where it remained until 2015.
In 1948, Shimun met with the representatives of Iraq, Syria and Iran in Washington DC, subsequently calling upon his followers to "live as loyal citizens wherever they resided in the Middle East" and relinquishing his role as a temporal leader and the nationalistic role of the church. This left a power vacuum in Assyrian politics that was filled by the Assyrian Universal Alliance in 1968.
The seat of the Assyrian Church of the East remained in the United States even during the times of Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV. Only with the newly consecrated Patriarch Mar Gewargis III in 2015 did the patriarchal seat of the Assyrian Church of the East return to Iraq relocating in Ankawa in north Iraq.Richard Spencer, Iraq crisis: The streets of Erbil’s newly Christian suburb are now full of helpless people, The Daily Telegraph, 8 August 2014
Historians disagree as to who was responsible for ordering the mass killings. Stafford blames Arab nationalists, most prominently Rashid Ali al-Gaylani and Bakr Sidqi. According to him, Iraqi Army officers despised the Assyrians, and Sidqi in particular was vocal in his hatred for them. This view was also shared by British officials who recommended to Faysal not to send Sidqi to the north during the crisis.
According to some historians, the agitation against the Assyrians was also encouraged by Rashid Ali al-Gaylani's Arab nationalist government, which saw it as a distraction from the continuous Shiite revolt in the southern part of the country.
Husry blamed the Assyrians for starting the crisis and absolved Sidqi from ordering the mass killing in Simele. He hinted that Faysal was the authority who might have issued orders to exterminate Assyrian males. Kanan Makiya, a leftist Iraqi historian, presents the actions taken by the military as a manifestation of the nationalist anti-imperialist paranoia which was to culminate with the Ba'athists ascending to power in the 1960s. Fadhil al-Barrak, an Iraqi Ba'athist historian, credits Sidqi as the author of the whole campaign and the ensuing massacres. For him, the events were part of a history of Iraq prior to the true nationalist revolution.
The general Iraqi public opinion, promoted by newspapers, that the Assyrians were proxies used by the British to undermine the newly established kingdom, was also shared by some leading officials, including the prime minister. British and European protests following the massacre only confirmed to them that the "Assyrian rebellion" was the work of European imperialism.
Both King George V of the United Kingdom and Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, took a personal interest in the Assyrian affair. British representatives at home demanded from Faysal that Sidqi and other culprits be tried and punished. The massacres were seen in Europe as a jihad against a small Christian minority.
In the long term, however, the British backed Iraq and rejected an international inquiry into the killings, fearing that this may provoke further massacres against Christians. They also did not insist on punishing the offenders, who were now seen as heroes by Iraqis. The official British stance was to defend the Iraqi government for its perseverance and patience in dealing with the crisis and to attribute the massacres to rogue army units. A report on the battle of Dirabun blames the Assyrians, defends the actions of the Iraqi Army, and commends Sidqi as a good officer.
The change in British attitude towards the Assyrians gave rise to the notion of a "British betrayal" among some Assyrian circles. This charge first surfaced after 1918, when the British did not follow through with their repeated promises to resettle Assyrians where they would be safe following the Sayfo launched by the Ottomans during the First World War.
The massacres also had a deep impact on the newly established Kingdom of Iraq. Kanan Makiya argues that the killing of Assyrians transcended tribal, religious, ideological and ethnic barriers as Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Sunni Kurds, Sunni Turkmen, Shia Turkmen, and Yazidis, as well as Monarchists, Islamists, nationalists, royalists, conservatives, Leftists, federalists, and tribalists, were all united in their anti-Assyrian and anti-Christian sentiments. According to him, the pogrom was "the first genuine expression of national independence in a former Arab province of the Ottoman Empire" and that the killing of Assyrian Christians was seen as a national duty.
The British were standing firmly behind the leaders of their former colony during the crisis, despite the popular animosity towards them. Brigadier General E. H. Headlam of the British military mission in Baghdad was quoted saying "the government and people have good reasons to be thankful to Colonel Bakr Sidqi".
The Simele massacre continues to remain integral to the understanding of modern Assyrian identity, as the memory of persecution still holds strong within descendants of survivors and the general Assyrian people today. Shlimon Bet Shmuel, an Assyrian artist from Iraq, sang a song publicly about the Simele massacre in 1973, which would lead to his exile to Tehran. Shlimon had performed the song during the third anniversary of the Assyrian Cultural Club in Baghdad, and was identified as a nationalistic singer by the Ba'athist government of Iraq. Shlimon's song stands out as one of many different poems and stories that have been written about the massacre since 1933, with other's such as William Saroyan's Seventy Thousand Assyrians also gaining recognition.
The events of Simele are said to have influenced Raphael Lemkin in his coining of the term genocide when devising initial provisions to prevent such crimes from occurring again. In the Assyrian community worldwide, the 7th of August has officially become known as Assyrian Martyrs Day, also known as the National Day of Mourning, in memory for the Simele massacre, declared so by the Assyrian Universal Alliance in 1970. While the day is usually commemorated to remembering the massacre, it has since been extended to apply to other events such as the Sayfo. In 2004, the Ba'athist Syrian government banned an Assyrian political organization from commemorating the event and threatened arrests if any were to break the ban.
(2025). 9780944029848, Washington Institute for Near East Policy. ISBN 9780944029848
Responsibility for the massacres
Official British sources estimate the total number of all Assyrians killed during August 1933 at around 600, while Assyrian sources put the figure at 3,000.
British role
Iraqi–British relations entered a short cooling-down period during and after the crisis. The Iraqis were previously encouraged by the British to detain Patriarch Shimun in order to defuse tensions. The British were also wary of Iraqi military leaders and recommended Sidqi, a senior ethnic Kurdish general who was stationed in Mosul, be transferred to another region due to his open animosity towards the Assyrians. Later, they had to intervene to dissuade Faysal from personally leading a tribal force to punish the Assyrians.
Cultural impact and legacy
The massacre had a deep psychological impact on Assyrians in the new Iraqi state. Namely, the events of Simele are often cited as the catalyst for the modern Assyrian naming dispute, as the Chaldean Catholic and Syriac Orthodox churches are believed to have started distancing their adherents from Assyrian identity after the massacre. Both churches are believed to have supported the Iraqi army under duress.
Notes
Further reading
Categories: 1933 Murders In Iraq, 20th-century Mass Murder In Iraq, August 1933 In Asia, History Of Dohuk Governorate, Looting In Iraq, Massacres Committed By Iraq, Massacres In 1933, Massacres In Iraqi Kurdistan, Massacres Of Christians, Massacres Of Ethnic Groups, Persecution Of Assyrians In Iraq, Simele
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