A people who outlived their empire.

The land between the rivers

The Assyrians are indigenous to northern Mesopotamia — the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates, in what is today northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northeastern Syria, and northwestern Iran. Their presence in this region reaches back roughly four and a half thousand years, to a world of city-states, written law, and monumental architecture.

This was a civilization that recorded itself. Cuneiform — wedge-marks pressed into clay — preserved contracts, prayers, omens, and chronicles, so that a great deal of what we know about the ancient Near East survives in the Assyrians’ own words.

Nineveh and the library

At its height, the Neo-Assyrian Empire was among the largest the ancient world had seen. Kings such as Ashurnasirpal II built vast palaces at Nimrud, lined with carved stone reliefs and guarded by lamassu — the human-headed winged bulls and lions that stood at the gates.

The capital, Nineveh, held a library of tens of thousands of clay tablets gathered under Ashurbanipal — one of the earliest organized collections of human knowledge. Nineveh fell in 612 BC, and the empire ended. But the people did not end with it. The kingdom was a chapter; the nation continued.

A faith carried east, a tongue kept alive

The Assyrians were among the earliest peoples to embrace Christianity. Through the Church of the East they carried it deep into Asia over the following centuries. And through their faith they kept their language: a living descendant of Aramaic, the lingua franca of the ancient Near East, still spoken, sung, and prayed today.

Around them, empires rose and fell — Persian, Roman, Arab, Mongol, Ottoman. The Assyrians passed under each. The language survived in the liturgy and in the home, generation after generation.

The first recorded modern genocide

The first recorded genocide of Assyrians in modern times took place in 1843, in the mountains of Hakkari (modern-day southeastern Turkey). Kurdish forces under Bedr Khan Beg, sanctioned by Ottoman officials, swept through Assyrian villages with what The Times of London described as "fire and sword." At least ten thousand Assyrians were killed; women and children were enslaved; churches were blown apart with gunpowder, and the patriarchal library — a centuries-old collection of manuscripts — burned with them.

It was the first of the modern campaigns to end a people who had lived almost autonomously in those mountains for thousands of years. Similar assaults followed across the 1840s.

Sayfo — “the sword”

Beginning in late 1914 and continuing for more than a decade — with the peak between 1915 and 1918 — the Ottoman Turks and allied Kurdish tribes subjected the Assyrian Christian population to a systematic campaign of massacre, torture, abduction, deportation, and starvation. The campaign reached across modern-day Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, and unfolded in the same years and regions as the Armenian and Greek genocides. Whole villages were emptied; survivors fled on foot across the mountains into exile that, for many, never ended. Assyrian intellectual and religious leaders were targeted for assassination, including the Patriarch Mar Benyamin Shimun XXI, killed in March 1918 under a flag of truce.

Recent scholarship cited by Assyrian community institutions puts the death toll at upwards of 250,000 — more than half the entire Assyrian population at the time. In 2007, the International Association of Genocide Scholars reached consensus that these atrocities constituted genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. Turkey continues to deny the genocide to this day.

Simele

Less than two decades after Sayfo, the newly independent Kingdom of Iraq turned on the Assyrians who had resettled there. The Assyrians had been petitioning the League of Nations for autonomy and the freedom to emigrate; Iraqi nationalist propaganda had cast them as violent rebels. In August 1933, Iraqi troops and Kurdish irregulars, under General Bakr Sidqi, were given permission to eliminate "any and all Assyrians."

The inhabitants of more than 100 villages across Dohuk and Nineveh were attacked. Up to 3,000 were killed at Simele itself, where the worst massacres occurred, and the wider campaign killed as many as 6,000 Assyrian men, women, and children, with tens of thousands more displaced. The horror was stark enough to help move the jurist Raphael Lemkin toward a word the world then lacked: genocide.

The Iraqi government has never recognized the massacre. Victims were buried in mass graves; relatives were prohibited from unearthing them for proper burial. Today the gravesite at Simele sits unprotected, marked only as "Simmel Archaeological Hill" — victims’ bones still scattered across the surface, the area used as a waste yard, a communications tower built atop the hill by the Kurdistan Regional Government. Calls from the Assyrian community for a dignified reburial and proper memorial have gone unanswered.

Soriya

On the morning of September 16, 1969, Iraqi forces under Lieutenant Abdul Karim al-Jahayshee attacked the Assyrian village of Soriya in Dohuk. Of roughly 100 villagers, 47 were killed — including the local priest — and 22 wounded. Houses were burned; survivors who could still run fled toward the neighboring village of Bakhlogia, four kilometers away, where it was too dangerous for anyone to take them in.

The exact motivation remains unclear; some accounts link the attack to a mine detonated under an Iraqi military vehicle nearby, during a period when Assyrians were involved in armed resistance against the Ba’ath Party. The Iraqi government has never recognized the massacre. Very little research on it exists. It is recorded here because, like Simele, its erasure is part of the wound.

The Nineveh Plains, again

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries brought renewed instability. After 2003, churches were bombed and communities pressured. Then in 2014, ISIS swept the Nineveh Plains — the Assyrian heartland — displacing hundreds of thousands of Christians and deliberately destroying ancient heritage at sites such as Nimrud and Nineveh. Local Kurdish forces, who had earlier disarmed the Assyrians, withdrew ahead of the ISIS advance without warning. Close to half of those displaced have not returned.

In February 2015, ISIS struck again — this time the 35 Assyrian villages of the Khabour Region in Syria. Dozens were killed and roughly 200 civilians were taken captive. Most were eventually released; three were murdered on camera. The cruelest detail of all: most of the Assyrians of the Khabour Region at that time were either survivors of the 1933 Simele Massacre or their direct descendants. One survivor of the Khabour attack told interviewers: "My grandmother used to tell me stories of the genocide. I never thought that one day I would have a similar story to tell."

The ISIS atrocities were formally recognized as genocide by the United Nations, the European Parliament, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Department of State in 2016.

Still here

Today the Assyrians live both in their ancestral homeland and in a diaspora that spans the world — large communities in the United States, Europe, Australia, and beyond. The language is still taught and spoken. The name is still kept. The churches still hold their ancient liturgies.

To survive the fall of an empire, and then survive the centuries, and then survive the genocides — and still carry the language and the name — is the story this site exists to tell. They are not a footnote. They are still here.