On Martyrs Day: Remembering Simele
General Petros Elia, head negotiator for the Assyrian nation between 1919 and 1923.
Yousef VI Emmanuel II Thomas, patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church from 1900 until his death in 1947.
Madame Habiba, matron of the military hospital who was featured in Shall This Nation Die?
By Chris Salem
Imagine attending a wedding a century ago with hundreds of friends and family at a community banquet hall like Shenandoah. Everyone was enjoying themselves and then suddenly, invaders showed up. They were not coming to rob or steal; they were coming to eradicate you and your people with a darkness that knew no bounds. They started by disarming any potentially armed men, rounding them all up, and murdering them in front of their wives, mothers, children, and the entire extended family. In this horror story, once every adult male was sprayed with dozens of bullets, no one remained to protect the hundreds of horrified widows and daughters from the invaders who committed unspeakable, gender-specific crimes against them.
This story is not fictional — it is your history. It began with the Seyfo Genocide between 1914 – 1925 and peaked with the Semele [Simele] Massacre in 1933, exactly 90 years ago. If you ever wondered what our community was doing during World War I and the Great Depression, this was it.
Age was not a factor in these crimes. Little girls and elderly women were not immune from assaults on their dignity. After the invaders attacked, they disposed of the women in the same way they did the men. Some committed suicide rather than being held captive. Some were given the option to be promoted to the second, third, or fourth wife of their assailant, but under strict conditions requiring conversion. Other women were kidnapped, transported, and sold to the highest bidder.
After watching their mothers and sisters get violated, and their fathers and brothers get shot, any children who were old enough to remember what they witnessed also got shot. The invaders could not risk vengeful 8-year-olds growing up with fire in their hearts, plotting their demise. The loose ends were tied up.
The youngest, too young to remember such horrors, were torn from their roots and raised to become like the very monsters who deleted their family’s existence and reshaped their lives. Not every child shared this fate. Many of them were turned into targets for sport.
This is what happened during the Semele Massacre in 1933. Many of the victims had fled what later became Turkey after the Seyfo Genocide and eventually settled in Semele, Iraq. Semele is about 40 miles away from Tel Keppe, and about 25 miles from Alqosh. The genocide in Turkey was perpetrated by the Ottoman government, Turkish irregulars, Kurdish militants, Circassians, Arabs, and Azeris, Persians, while the atrocity in Semele was a state sponsored massacre by the Iraqi Government and Kurdish militants.
An estimated 6,000 Christians were killed and over 100 villages were destroyed over a period of several days. in a single day. Those who remained fled to Alqosh, where they were protected by their heavily armed brethren, according to a documentary by Wilson Sarkis.
August 7 is the 90-year anniversary of the Semele Massacre, which is also known as Martyr’s Day. In a groundbreaking move, the U.S. House of Representatives has introduced a resolution—H. RES. 472— to formally recognize and remember the Semele Massacre of 1933. This resolution seeks to rectify the historical injustice faced by our community, rejects any attempt to deny the massacre, and emphasizes the need for public education about the incident.
When the invaders successfully exterminated 3/4 of our population during WWI, it was because of division. Division led to the fall of our ancient empire and led to the Seyfo Genocide in World War I. Division also led to the Semele Massacre. In a book detailing an account of the massacre of Christians by the Turks in Persia, author Yonan Shahbaz wrote the following:
“The Mohammedans were, of course, pleased to see the Christians fighting one another. In the towns the latter were always at variance; each sect claimed that the others had no right to be there, and they opposed one another with great animosity. Each despised the other, very often on the mere ground that one had been the longer in the country. These bitter and outrageous feelings have been held for years, many years. The complaints were transmitted from one generation to the next.”
Within the last few hundred years, divisive church politics weakened a nation one race of people into multiple competing churches, and we lost hundreds of thousands as a result. They died in the cruelest ways for their Christianity and their way of life, culture, and heritage. Our Church is known as the “Church of Martyrs” for that reason.
Some, fortunately, lived to tell the story. One of those people was Chaldean Reverend Joseph Naayem, who published a book in 1921 called “Shall This Nation Die?”. Without people like him, we wouldn’t even know the massacre happened in the first place. All the screams, horror, blood, and destruction would have simply vanished into the dark abyss of oblivion. In fact, the Turkish government publicly denies this ever happened, like they do with the Armenian Genocide, which happened in the same place at the same time.
Some estimates report losses of up to 300,000 people, while others are as high as 750,000.
Imagine all the relationships that were lost, the wealth that was burned, and the traditions that are now stored deep in the vastness of obscurity. We’ll never fully know what we lost. Millions of lives, possibilities, and dreams vanished into the void of the past, leaving only shadows of what might have been. This is our history, and history repeats itself. ISIS rose in 2014. Now, our people are barely hanging on by a thread in the homeland.
The Jews spare no detail when they discuss the holocaust. Neither do the Armenians when they talk about their genocide, or African Americans when they talk about slavery. If our ancestors went through all of that, the least we can do is read and know about it.
We were at a crossroads in 2014; face extinction or do something about it. Now that we have finally settled in the West, transformed ourselves entirely, and achieved financial success, we can finally do something about it. Several nonprofit organizations exist for this exact purpose, like the Chaldean Community Foundation, Assyrian Aid Society, Help Iraq, Etuti Institute, and Nineveh Rising. Find the one you resonate with and make a difference so that this history never again repeats itself.