Sayfo and the First World War

A field of historical research

The academic volume Let Them Not Return examines violence against Assyrian, Syriac and Chaldean Christians during and after the First World War, across borderland regions now in Turkey, Iran and Iraq. Sayfo is a central term in the study and remembrance of this history.

Scholarship and testimony

The annotated source published as Sayfo - An Account of the Assyrian Genocide presents an eyewitness narrative associated with greater Tur Abdin. Eyewitness accounts preserve essential perspectives; they should be contextualised through location, date, authorship and comparison with other evidence.

A careful expansion

This entry avoids an unsupported single casualty total and does not imply every region experienced identical events. A full treatment should distinguish local chronologies, survivor histories, displacement and later commemoration. The linked public catalogue descriptions are accessible, while access to complete books can vary. They are not marked here as freely licensed full texts.

Several regions, connected destruction

Sayfo names the genocide of Assyrian and other Syriac Christian communities during the First World War, especially in Ottoman territories and adjoining conflict zones. Killing, forced flight and the destruction of communities unfolded through different local sequences in Tur Abdin, Hakkari and the wider borderlands.

Wartime policy, local power relationships, armed mobilisation and frontier conditions affected particular episodes. Naming region and actors is therefore necessary when explaining what happened. One village's sequence should not become an assumed identical story for every other place.

Loss continued through displacement

Flight separated families from land, livelihoods, institutions and books. People also died under the conditions of displacement. The rebuilding of communities elsewhere belongs to the aftermath and should not be reduced to a short concluding sentence.

Testimony, diplomatic and missionary records, community accounts and scholarship contribute different evidence. They help reconstruct local events and the wider pattern of destruction. Genocide describes that larger destruction, but cannot replace an explanation of people's experiences, the actions involved and the evidence for a particular event.