Assyrian genocide

"The Chaldean diocese of Jazire, including its archbishops, priests and residents, has been completely exterminated. Only two priests, one from Peshkhabur [Fayshkhabour] and one from Guerke, managed to escape with 400 or 500 people and were the last to arrive in Mosul. His Holiness, the patriarch, has taken them under patriarchal protection."

"[T]he East Syrians [Assyrians] were twice the victims of a general genocide - first in the late fourteenth century by Tamerlane, and then in 1915/1918 by the Turks and Kurds."

"Continuing working on a book on Danish-Armenian relations of course during the Armenian Genocide, but also before and after that spanning from 1900 to 1940, and as I work in genocide I’m thinking of writing about other aspects of Young Turk policies like the destruction of the Ottoman Greeks and the Assyrians."

"It is believed that in Turkey between 1913 and 1922, under the successive regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), more than 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were massacred in a state-organized and state-sponsored campaign of destruction and genocide, aiming at wiping out from the emerging Turkish Republic its native Christian populations. This Christian Holocaust is viewed as the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. To this day, the Turkish government ostensibly denies having committed this genocide."

"The ghastly slope was crowned by thousands of half-nude and still bleeding corpses, lying in heaps, or interlaced in death’s final embrace. … Overcome by the hideous spectacle, and jumping our horses over the mountains of cadavers, which obstructed our passage, I entered Siirt with my men. There we found the police and the populace engaged in sacking the homes of the Christians. … I met various sub-Governors of the province … who had directed the massacre in person. From their talk I realized at once that the thing had been arranged the day before … Meanwhile I had taken up my lodging in a handsome house belonging to Nestorians, which had been sacked like all the rest. There was nothing left in the way of furniture except a few broken chairs. Walls and floors were stained with blood."

"Turkish denialism of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians is official, driven, constant, rampant and increasing each year since the events of 1915 to 1922. It is state-funded, with special departments and units in overseas missions whose sole"

"… Haydar Bey, the Governor of Mosul, came with Turkish units and cannons.... The Turks occupied our villages and burned them down. Now Assyrians live on the mountain peaks.... They are dying from hunger, because they have no food. We have no bullets, we are surrounded by the Turks, and we have no solution."

"Historians, perhaps concerned not to magnify these events by comparison with those of 1915-16, tend to avoid the term genocide to describe them. In my formulation, however, these events would"

"A very rough estimate of the total of Ottoman Assyrian dead as a result of massacre before and after April–May 1915, and of wartime starvation and the conditions of flight, might be in the region of 20,000–30,000, to which should be added perhaps 7,000 Persian Assyrians."

"The bloodstained annals of the East contain no record of massacres more unprovoked, more widespread or more terrible than those perpetrated by the Turkish Government upon the Christians of Anatolia and Armenia in 1915. It was the sufferings of the Armenians that chiefly drew the attention of Britain and America because they were the most numerous among the ecclesiastical bodies, and the slaughter was, therefore, on a larger scale. But the minor communities, such as the Nestorian and Assyro-Chaldean churches, were equally the victims of the plan for exterminating Christianity, root and branch,. although the Turks had never ventured to allege that these communities had given any ground of offense."

"The ethnic and religious balance that could have contributed to the well being of all the inhabitants of northern Mesopotamia was terminated because their Islamic neighbours lost the will to co-exist with the Christian Assyrians. This development claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and ultimately contributed to driving the remaining Assyrians from the land of their ancestors."

"The full-scale Ottoman invasion of Persian Azerbeijan at the beginning of 1915 was accompanied by killings of both Armenians and Assyrians...."