Tuesday, June 15 marked the 106th anniversary of the beginning of the Assyrian Genocide by Ottoman Turkey committed between 1915 and 1923.During this period, Assyrians — alongside Greeks and Armenians — were exposed to genocide, in which around 300,000 Assyrians perished. Assyrians call the crime “seyfo,” which means “sword” in their language, as swords were widely used to murder the victims.Assyrians, also known as Syriacs, are an indigenous Christian people in the Middle East. They have been subject to many massacres and other crimes at the hands of regional governments and communities such as Turkey, Iraq, and Kurds as well as terror groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS.Historians record that the first massacre of Assyrians in modern times took place in the 1840s in northern Mesopotamia. Professor Hannibal Travis writes:”The Ottoman Turks allowed the Assyrians to be massacred by the Kurdish chieftain Badr Khan Bey, who summoned the surrounding Muslim population to a “Holy War,” killing 10,000 Assyrians, enslaving many women and children, and ravaging villages. Turkish soldiers and their Kurdish allies murdered the Christians of half a dozen Mesopotamian Christian villages; the surviving women and children were kidnapped and enslaved. Slavery was a common fate of Ottoman Christians in the nineteenth century.”To read the full story, check out the article on Jihad Watch.
“https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/06/june-15-106th-anniversary-of-turkeys-1915-assyrian-genocide
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