Joe25 said:
Just a few notes I've been digging up:
-Urmia is where many Assyrians lived in North Iran. They were successful with their villages, had some wealth etc. During the genocide in WW1 the Persians tried to wipe all christians out but forces led by Agha Petros stopped this from happening(though many villagers lost their lives) and took control of parts of the city. There are severol old photographs of this as well in the book.
-American Reverend David H. Oraham who was a lifeline to Assyrians in Iran was assasinated. The way they ended him was beyond barbaric.
-American compounds for missionairies, consulates and even a college were attacked brutally by Persian forces and all the wealth stolen. Assyrians had to seek refugee in these buildings later and many were still slaughtered. Disease broke out too. It's horrid to read about.
-Patriach Mar Shimon had tried many arrangements for peace with the higher ups of Iran including the Prince in Tabriz. All to no avail.
-Persian authorities conspired with the Kurdish militias lead by Simkoo(This animal had been treated by christian physicians before btw) to assasinate the patriach Mar Shimon in Salmas. This was after all the peace talks with the Persians who gained his trust somehow.
There are many details. Basicely it was a full blown jihad against Assyrians and all christians in Iran. It's sad that Agha Petros and the Patriach were trying to so hard to send their Assyrian militias around but massacress were spread out over many distant villages and towns. Not to mention that all of this was happening all over the Ottoman empire at the time too. These facts make it quite easy to believe the huge numbers of casualties of the Seyfo. We almost didn't stand a chance.
We didn't have enough forces to protect us all even though the ones we had were more skilled and effective than all the islamists, we were completely outnumbered and our only hopes were our alliances with the Russian troops, The British(betrayed us many times too) and the small Armenian armies who teamed up with us.
Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Persians, basicely every muslim group had a hand in our genocide.
This is true. Also, I would like to add what Ph.D Arianne Ishaya, Professor in the Anthropology department at De Anza College, Cupertino, CA has stated regarding Assyrians from Urmia, Iran.
"With the beginning of WWI, the rate of literacy among the Assyrians of Urmia was estimated at 80%.(9 )
This is a remarkably high rate of literacy for the time even by the standards of an urbanized center in the West, let alone a rural area in the Middle East. At the time, there were more Assyrian physicians in Urmia than all of Iran; Assyrian professionals under the supervision of the foreign missionaries staffed all missionary schools, newspapers and hospitals.(10)"
Ishaya referenced:
9: C. Issawi, The Economic History of Iran: 1900-1914, vol. 1 (1971), 24.
10: H. Murre-van den Berg, ?The Missionaries? Assistants,? JAAS 10, no. 2 (1996): 10.
See her entire article at:
http://www.nineveh.com/Assyrians%20in%20the%20History%20of%20Urmia,%20Iran.html
Although Iran (like any Muslims nation) was filled with hostility and backwardness, I would also like to add that Iranians were far more more benign than other Muslims. Some Iranians did support Kurds, Arabs, Azeris and Turks in the Assyrian genocide, but there are a few notable instances were they tried to protect Assyrians from those people. I believe Iranians today are still like this -they definitely have problems but generally, they are good people who have some terrible beliefs based on their Islamic ideologies.
When Turks got a hold of Urmia (granting access to those ethnic minorities to attack), the Assyrian community there was devastated, the people were massacred and deported having many of those deportees dying as they traversed mostly towards eastern Iran. Some made it to eastern Iran, others eventually returned to Urmia, but the society there had significantly lost it's size and therefore it's capacity to function as effectively as it did before.
Before the Assyrian genocide, in 1840, Urmian Assyrians acquired the first printing press in Iran and used it to make several publications in Classical Syriac.
