Sayfo, genocide of Assyrian Christians §

Background

Sayfo, "the sword", refers to the destruction of Assyrian, Syriac Orthodox, Chaldean and Church of the East communities during the First World War. These communities lived across the same Ottoman-Persian borderlands where Armenians were targeted, and they were caught in the same security logic of Christian disloyalty.

The genocide

Ottoman troops, Kurdish irregulars and local authorities attacked villages, monasteries and refugee columns in Hakkari, Tur Abdin, Bitlis, Salmas and Urmia. The seeded estimate of 250,000–300,000 dead is widely used in scholarship but remains contested because the communities were dispersed across several churches, languages and imperial jurisdictions contested.

Relation to 1915

Sayfo should not be treated as a footnote to the Armenian Genocide. It was a parallel Christian-destruction campaign that shared perpetrators, routes and ideological assumptions. Gaunt is especially important because he documents both perpetrators and Muslim protectors, preventing the record from becoming a simple communal morality play. sourced opinion

The event widens the frame: the CUP's wartime violence was not only anti-Armenian. It was a broader remaking of eastern Anatolia in which several Christian populations were removed, killed or dispersed editorial.