Greek Assyrian and Armenian Genocide

The opening sentence of Resolution 296 acknowledges “the campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other Christians.” And that last word—Christians—is key to understanding this tragic chapter of history: Christianity is what all those otherwise diverse peoples had in common, and therefore it—not nationality, ethnicity, or grievances—was the ultimate determining factor concerning who the Turks would and would not “purge.”

The genocide is often conflated with the Armenians because many more of them than other ethnicities were killed—causing them to be the face of the genocide.  According to generally accepted figures, the Turks exterminated 1.5 million Armenians, 750,000 Greeks, and 300,000 Assyrians. As for the latter peoples (the word “Assyrian” also encompasses Chaldeans, Syriacs, and Arameans) half of their population of 600,000 was slaughtered in the genocide.  In other words, relative to their numbers, they lost more than any other Christian group, including the Armenians.

Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide (published 2016) underscores that 1) the Assyrians were systematically massacred, and that 2) the ultimate reason for their—and therefore the Armenians’ and Greeks’—genocide was their Christian identity.
The book’s author, Joseph Yacoub, an emeritus professor at the Catholic University of Lyon, offers copious contemporary documentation recounting countless atrocities against the Assyrians—massacres, rapes, death marches, sadistic eye-gouging, and the desecration and destruction of hundreds of churches.

While acknowledging that the Assyrians were “annihilated by the murderous madness of Ottoman power, driven by a hideous form of unbridled nationalism,” Yacoub also affirms that the “policy of ethnic cleansing was stirred up by pan-Islamism and religious fanaticism.  Christians were considered infidels (kafir).  The call to Jihad, decreed on 29 November 1914 and instigated and orchestrated for political ends, was part of the plan” to “combine and sweep over the lands of Christians and to exterminate them.”   Several key documents, including one from 1920, confirm that there was “an Ottoman plan to exterminate Turkey’s Christians.”