Assyrians displaced from Hakkari during the First World War had been settled in northern Iraq under British mandate and many served in the Iraq Levies; after Iraqi independence in 1932 their demands for autonomy and their association with British power made them politically exposed. In August 1933, after an armed clash near the Syrian border, Iraqi army units under Bakr Sidqi and allied Kurdish and Arab irregulars killed Assyrian villagers in Simele and dozens of surrounding villages, with League of Nations and British reports giving figures from 600 to 3,000 dead and describing summary executions of unarmed men. Survivors fled to Syria, and the League of Nations, which had guaranteed minority protection in Iraq, arranged their settlement on the Khabur river; the massacre and the League's failure to protect a minority it had underwritten contributed directly to Raphael Lemkin's formulation of the concept that became genocide, which he first presented to a legal conference in Madrid in 1933. Bakr Sidqi was feted in Baghdad and went on to lead a coup in 1936. Iraq has never conducted an official inquiry; the Iraqi Kurdistan parliament recognised the massacre in 2013 and Assyrian organisations mark 7 August as a memorial day. The scale of the killing is far smaller than most events in this atlas, and it is included for its role as a template of state violence against a minority and for the dispersal it began.
The Iraqi army and allied irregulars killed Assyrian villagers in and around Simele, driving survivors into Syria
League of Nations mandate records put the Assyrian refugee community resettled in northern Iraq from Hakkari and Urmia after the First World War at roughly 20,000-25,000; adding the longer-established Assyrian and Chaldean communities of the Mosul region gives a total of about 40,000, though definitions of who counted as Assyrian rather than Chaldean varied between the British administration, the Iraqi state and the churches. Iraq's 1932 population estimate did not enumerate the community separately.
The low figure is the count in British and League of Nations reporting immediately after the events; the high figure comes from Assyrian community sources and later accounts that include killings in outlying villages over the following weeks. No forensic investigation was carried out.
League of Nations commission reports and British consular and Royal Air Force reporting documented the summary execution of unarmed Assyrian men and the looting and destruction of villages.
Iraq, Syria