Welcome everyone, and especially a massive welcome
to you, our listener, for joining us today on
another custom tailored deep dive. We've got
a... well... a pretty heavy stack of source material
in front of us today. We really do. It's meticulously
detailed. Lots of historical archives, demographic
records, geopolitical data. Yeah. And we're going
to use all of that to extract the most critical
insights from a deeply complex, incredibly dark,
and honestly often overlooked period of early
20th century history. Right. The paramount piece
of global history. We are focusing our lens on
the shifting volatile geopolitical forces during
the First World War, specifically the era from
1914 to roughly 1924. Which violently redrew
the map of the Middle East. Yeah. And an unimaginable
human cost. Absolutely. So our specific topic
today is the safe foe or seafo. And just for
context, that is a neo -aramaic word that translates
literally to sword. But since the 10th century,
it's carried a much heavier cultural weight.
Right. Taking on the meaning of extermination
or extinction. And today, that term refers specifically
to the mass murder and deportation of Assyrian
and Syriac Christians in the Ottoman Empire and
Persia during World War One. Our mission for
this deep dive is to really untangle the incredibly
complicated roots of this history. We want to
understand the overarching imperial ambitions
that led to it. The big picture stuff. Exactly.
But also examine the highly localized nature
of the violence on the ground. And we want to
explore a profound historical paradox. Why this
massive event, which completely decimated an
ancient population, remains so much less known
globally than the concurrent Armenian genocide.
Yeah, that's a huge question we'll get into.
But before we step into 1914, a quick note for
you as we dive into this material. Very. The
historical records here, especially regarding
the international recognition and the subsequent
denial of these events, are deeply politically
charged. Very heavily debated today. Right. So
our mission today is not to take sides. We aren't
endorsing any specific political viewpoint here.
We are strictly and impartially serving as your
guides through the source material. We're just
laying out the historical accounts, the international
lobbying efforts, and the modern -day Turkish
government's official denials exactly as they
are documented in the provided text. Exactly.
Our goal is simply to convey the ideas, facts,
and conflicting narratives contained in that
original material. Nothing more. Our role is
to examine the provided information objectively,
helping you understand both what happened on
the ground and how the legacy of those events
is fiercely contested a century later. Okay,
let's unpack this because to really understand
the SIFO, we can't just look at the dates of
World War I. We have to start by setting the
physical and cultural scene. We have to go to
the mountains. Yes, I want you to imagine living
in the Hakari Mountains. These aren't just rolling
picturesque hills we're talking about. We are
talking about jagged, imposing peaks reaching
up to 13 ,000 feet into the sky, separated by
incredibly steep, treacherous gorges. In many
of these areas, there are absolutely no roads.
Right. The only way in or out is by navigating
narrow footpaths literally carved into the sheer
sides of the mountains. It is an extreme, almost
unfathomable level of remote isolation. If we
connect this to the bigger picture, that mountainous
tapestry shaped the very identity of the people
living there. How so? Well, to understand why
that matters, we have to look at how the Ottoman
Empire was structured administratively at the
time. The empire didn't organize its populations
by ethnicity. Right, it was by religion. Exactly.
They organized them by religion. This framework
was known as the Millet System. So an Ottoman
official isn't looking at these Highlanders and
categorizing them as ethnic Assyrians. Far from
it. The source actually notes that even speaking
of an Assyrian genocide during this specific
time period is a bit anachronistic. Because they
didn't see themselves that way yet. Right. The
Assyrians weren't a unified cohesive nation.
They were divided into different and frequently
mutually antagonistic religious denominations.
You had the Syriac Orthodox Church? The Assyrian
Church of the East. The Chaldean Catholic Church.
Exactly. When asked who they were, their primary
loyalty and identity lay with their specific
church, not a broader ethnic umbrella. And because
they lived in these incredibly remote, high -altitude
regions of Hakari, they were effectively stateless
for generations. I mean, they settled in those
mountains specifically to avoid the reach of
imperial state control. Which ended up being
a massive double -edged sword. Yeah. On one hand,
living up in the clouds helped them avoid paying
taxes to the Ottoman Empire. Right. And it kept
their young men from being conscripted into the
Imperial Army. But the flip side is tragic. It
cemented their internal differences. Right. It
completely prevented them from forming a unified
national identity or a cohesive political movement,
which is a stark contrast to the Armenian national
movement that was rapidly developing at the exact
same time. And then you add the shifting dynamics
of the 19th and early 20th centuries to that
mix. Right. The Ottoman Empire was desperately
trying to modernize, to centralize its power.
The state wanted to assert control over these
historically stateless, rebellious mountain regions.
And compounding this pressure was a massive demographic
shift. After the Ottoman Empire lost significant
territory in the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913,
a huge influx of Muslim refugees poured into
eastern Anatolia. And the government had to put
them somewhere. Exactly. They decided to resettle
these refugees on land confiscated from populations
they deemed disloyal or problematic. So you take
an incredibly isolated, fractured region. You
introduce centralizing state troops. And you
flood the area with displaced refugees competing
for scarce land and resources. It turned the
entire mountainous region into a powder keg of
tension. Which brings us right to the brink of
World War I. The geopolitical chess match is
in full swing. The Ottomans and the Russians
are preparing for a massive clash. And they are
both actively courting the populations living
behind each other's lines. Hoping to spark guerrilla
warfare. internal sabotage. It was an impossibly
dangerous position for the Assyrians. The Russians
are looking across the border at the Armenians,
Kurds, and Assyrians living within the Ottoman
Empire trying to secure their support. Meanwhile,
the Ottomans are doing the exact same thing in
reverse. Right, trying to enlist Caucasian Muslims,
Armenians, and Assyrians living in Persian territory.
So the Assyrians just find themselves caught
directly in the crossfire of two massive paranoid
empires preparing for total war. Total war. The
war kicks off and the paranoia reaches a boiling
point. But what is the actual spark? What turns
this from simmering geopolitical tension into
active state sanctioned deportation? The directive
comes from the very top of the Ottoman government.
Specifically from the Committee of Union and
Progress, or the CUP. The ultra -nationalist
ruling party at the time. Yes. On October 26,
1914, just before the Ottoman Empire officially
entered the war, the Ottoman Interior Minister,
Talat Pasha, sent a telegram to the governor
of Van Province. And this telegram is key. It
is. In this dispatch, Talat actively doubts the
loyalty of the Haqqari Assyrians and explicitly
orders their deportation. And the specific parameters
of that deportation order are just staggering.
What's fascinating and horrifying here is the
calculated bureaucratic nature of that order.
The directive stated that the Assyrians were
to be resettled among Muslims further west. But
it included a strict condition. A non -negotiable
condition. No more than 20 Assyrians could reside
in any one place. Let's just pause and think
about that. 20 people. That is barely a few extended
families. How does a community, let alone an
ancient culture, survive being atomized like
that. It doesn't. And that was the entire point.
Yeah. When you cap a forced resettlement at 20
people, you aren't just moving a population for
military security. You are executing a deliberate
administrative strategy to completely destroy
their culture, their language, and their traditional
way of life. By scattering them so thinly across
the empire, they could never maintain their community
structures. or the religious practices. Exactly.
The source material notes that historian David
Gaunt cites this specific telegram and its Rule
of 20 as the definitive beginning of the SAFO.
From there, the sheer scale of the conflict that
follows is horrific. Initially, local Ottoman
forces, Kurdish volunteers, and irregular militias
couldn't mount successful attacks on the heavily
-armed Highland Assyrian tribes. The terrain
was just too tough. The tribes were too well
defended up there. So the forces targeted the
poorly armed, vulnerable Christian villages down
in the plains. Entire lowland populations were
massacred or forced to flee into neighboring
Persia. But the Highlanders up in the peaks didn't
just sit and wait for the army to arrive. No,
they took unprecedented action. In May 1915,
the disparate Assyrian highland tribes actually
held a meeting and declared war. They announced
a general mobilization against the Ottoman Empire.
They attempted a coordinated military defense,
even sending their women and children to the
highest, most inaccessible mountain areas to
protect them while the men fought below. But
determination only goes so far against an imperial
army. Despite achieving some victorious battles
in the rugged terrain, they were ultimately outnumbered.
cut off from supplies, and completely outgunned
by Ottoman forces who were equipped with heavy
German -manufactured artillery and modern machine
guns. By September 1915, the Highland tribes
realized the defense was broken. They had no
choice but to abandon their ancestral homes,
fighting their way out to escape into Persia,
watching their villages and farms burn behind
them. So the violence pushes outward. It's no
longer contained to just the Hakkari Mountains.
The geographic spread is vast and the source
material details some incredibly grim localized
events as the violence sweeps into Persia, Bitlis,
and Diyarbakir. This is a crucial aspect of the
SAFO. We see the violence take on a highly localized
character. Because while the broad overarching
directives for deportation and homogenization
came from the CUP central government in Constantinople.
Local actors frequently took matters into their
own hands. The central government created the
permissive environment, but local governors,
police chiefs, and tribal leaders frequently
dictated the ultimate severity and brutality
of the violence on the ground. Let's trace that
into Persia, specifically the Azerbaijan province.
Russia had troops stationed there early in the
war, and they had even armed some of the local
Assyrians to act as a buffer. But on January
1, 1915, the Russian forces abruptly and unexpectedly
withdrew from the region, leaving the Christian
populations completely exposed to advancing forces.
Ottoman troops occupied the region without any
major opposition. And almost immediately, local
Muslim populations and Ottoman troops began committing
massive pogroms. One of the most brutal systematic
incidents occurred at Haftaban. Yes, Ottoman
forces lured the local Christians there under
the guise of telling them they needed to register
with the new authorities. And once they gathered.
Over the course of two days in February, 700
to 800 people, essentially the entire male Christian
population of the area, were executed. by the
Ottoman army and the local Shekat Kurdish tribe.
It's an absolute nightmare scenario. The violence
even breached the walls of international missionary
compounds in Urmia, places where thousands of
desperate Christians had sought shelter, believing
they would be safe under foreign flags. At the
Lazarus compound, Ottoman forces forced their
way in. More than 100 men were arrested and dozens
were executed, including a prominent bishop.
Moving westward into the Bitlis province, the
nature of the violence becomes even more militarized.
We see the arrival of Jevdet Bey. An Ottoman
official who led a formidable 8 ,000 -man force.
He literally referred to his own troops as the
Butcher Battalion. Just a chilly name. And the
arrival of that battalion in the Sert district
was completely devastating. Sert was a major
historic Christian enclave. largely populated
by Chaldean Catholics. The source details a month
-long massacre orchestrated by local officials
there. Christians were killed in the streets
and the Chaldean diocese of Sert was completely
destroyed. And crucially, that destruction included
their vast library of rare ancient manuscripts.
Think about the weight of that for a second.
We are talking about the profound loss of human
life, which is always the paramount tragedy.
But alongside it is the systematic erasure of
centuries of recorded culture, theology in history.
They were burning the memory of the people. The
survivors in Sert, who were mostly women and
children because the men had been executed, were
then forced on brutal death marches. Driven south
through harsh terrain like the Wadi Wawila Gorge.
They were stripped of their possessions, often
their clothes, and anyone who fell behind out
of exhaustion or starvation was killed. Out of
an estimated 7 ,000 to 8 ,000 Chaldeans from
that specific area, maybe 50 to 100 actually
survived the agonizing march to Mosul. The localized,
almost autonomous brutality of the Seifo becomes
even more apparent when we examine the Diyarbak
province. Here we encounter an Ottoman governor
named Mehmed Rashid. Who essentially went rogue?
Completely rogue. He was specifically chosen
for his post because of his prior record of ruthless
violence, and he brought his own dedicated team
of operatives with him to the province. He instituted
a massive, systematic extermination campaign
against all Christians in his jurisdiction. What
makes Diyarbakir a unique case study for historians
is the surviving administrative trail. The central
Ottoman government, specifically Talat Pasha,
actually sent a telegram to Rashid. Explicitly
ordering that the harsh measures being taken
against the Armenians should absolutely not be
extended to other Christian groups like the Syriacs,
they directly told Rashid to stop targeting them.
But he entirely ignored the interior minister.
He did. Rashid and his deputies simply found
a bureaucratic loophole. They classified all
Aramaic -speaking Christians as Armenians. Wow.
By applying that label, they declared them enemies
of the state who had to be eliminated. Even though
the central government sent those explicit orders
to halt, Rashid faced zero consequences for ignoring
them and continuing the massacres. This blatant
lack of punishment leads many historians to debate
whether the central orders from Talat were genuine
attempts to stop the violence. Or simply a paper
trail created as a who appease protesting German
and Austrian diplomats who are allied with the
Ottomans. Here's where it gets really interesting
though. Amidst all this slaughter and systemic
violence. The source material makes it abundantly
clear that this wasn't purely a linear story
of defenseless victims quietly waiting for the
end. Right. There was fierce organized armed
resistance and tragically a vicious cycle of
inter -ethnic violence that emerged as the war
dragged on. In the Turabdin region, the situation
developed quite differently than in Hakkari or
Diyarbakir. While many lowland villages in the
area were completely wiped out, some mounted
incredibly successful prolonged defenses. The
villages of Iuardo and Azax stand out in the
historical record. Azak, for instance, was a
primarily Syriac Orthodox village. When Ottoman
authorities demanded they hand over their Catholic
and Protestant neighbors, the village refused.
They fortified their positions and repelled heavy
Ottoman military attacks for weeks. They held
the line so fiercely that they eventually launched
a surprise night attack, breaking the siege and
forcing the Ottoman forces to agree to a truce
on the villagers' own terms. It's a staggering
story of survival against all odds. But the shifting
power dynamics of resistance also took a very
dark turn as the war progressed. They did. After
the Russian forces completely withdrew following
the 1917 Russian Revolution, the region of Urmia
descended into total ethnic chaos. This raises
an important question or rather highlights a
deeply uncomfortable truth about the brutalizing
psychological effect of genocide and total war.
Yeah. By 1918, you had Well -organized, battle
-hardened Christian militias operating in Ermia,
led by military figures like Aga Petros. When
local Muslim populations and the Persian governor
launched an armed uprising against these Christian
groups, these Syrian militias didn't just defend
themselves. No. They brutally crushed the uprising,
killing hundreds and possibly thousands of local
Muslims in the process. The victims of a genocide
had, in that specific localized context, become
the perpetrators of mass violence. The source
quotes historian David Gahn, who observed that
the Assyrian victims, when suddenly given the
military advantage and the chance for revenge,
turned without hesitation into perpetrators.
It represents a complete tragic breakdown of
any longstanding societal links between the different
ethnic and religious groups in the region. And
shortly after this wave of violence, the spiritual
and temporal leader of the Assyrians, the patriarch
Marshamun, went to negotiate a crucial alliance
with a powerful Kurdish chieftain named Simko
Shekak. And in a devastating blow to the Assyrian
leadership, the patriarch is assassinated by
Simko Shekak during those very alliance talks.
Along with many of his bodyguards. This betrayal
triggered a massive uncontrollable spree of revenge
killings by Assyrian militias against local Kurdish
populations, which in turn sparked horrific retaliatory
massacres by Kurdish forces against any remaining
Christians they could find. It was absolute unmitigated
chaos. The total collapse of security forced
tens of thousands of surviving Assyrians to flee
south, desperately trying to reach British military
protection in Mesopotamia. This flight was a
harrowing ordeal all its own. They were constantly
harassed by Kurdish irregulars, ambushed by pursuing
Ottoman forces and dying of starvation and exhaustion
along the route. Eventually, the survivors ended
up in a massive, sprawling, British -run refugee
camp in Bakwuba, near Baghdad in modern -day
Iraq. And the conditions in the Bakba camp were
incredibly poor. Overcrowding, lack of sanitation,
disease ran rampant. An estimated 7 ,000 Assyrians
died of disease and exposure in that camp alone,
having survived the massacres and the marches
only to perish in exile. And to compound the
tragedy, after the war ended, despite various
British promises of safe resettlement or autonomy,
the Assyrians were never given an independent
state. and the vast majority were never allowed
to return to their ancestral homes in the mountains.
So what does this all mean for us today? Let's
talk about the legacy and the cold hard numbers.
The Assira Chaldean delegation that attended
the 1919 Paris Peace Conference estimated their
community's losses at roughly 250 ,000 to 275
,000 dead. To put that staggering number in perspective,
that represents roughly half of their entire
pre -war population. It is a demographic collapse
from which the community has never fully recovered.
Which brings us to a massive, lingering historical
paradox. With a death toll that high, representing
half of an entire civilization, why is the safe
foes so much less known globally than the Armenian
Genocide, which was happening in the exact same
empire, ordered by the exact same government
at exactly the same time? This raises an important
question, and the source outlines a few key reasons
for this glaring disparity in global recognition.
First, as we discussed with the milit system,
the Assyrians lacked a unified national identity.
Because they identified primarily by their specific
church denominations rather than as a single
ethnic group. Right. So mounting a collective
global advocacy campaign in the aftermath of
the war was incredibly difficult. Second, their
extreme geographic isolation in places like Hikari
meant there were far fewer international witnesses.
Fewer journalists or foreign diplomats present
to document the atrocities compared to the more
globally connected Armenian populations in major
cities. Exactly. Third, and perhaps most devastatingly,
was the massive systematic destruction of their
physical records. Like the library in CERT. When
institutions like that were burned to the ground,
much of the documentary evidence of their existence,
their culture, and their destruction was permanently
erased from the historical record. And that profound
erasure leads us directly into the current geopolitical
reality regarding the SIFO. As we promised at
the beginning of this deep dive, we are reporting
this impartially, based strictly on the provided
text. The legacy of the SAFO is deeply, often
fiercely, contested on the world stage today.
On one side you have the modern Assyrian diaspora.
In the second half of the 20th century, as Assyrians
migrated to Western countries with greater freedom
of speech and political organization, the grandchildren
of the original survivors began publicly sharing
the stories their families had kept quiet for
decades. By the 1990s, this diaspora community
began heavily lobbying for formal international
recognition of the SAFO as a genocide. And their
lobbying efforts have seen tangible success on
the international stage. According to the source,
the International Association of Genocide Scholars
formally recognized the Assyrian genocide in
2007. Furthermore, several national parliaments,
including the governments of Sweden, Armenia,
the Netherlands, and Germany, have passed official
resolutions explicitly acknowledging the events
of the SAFO as a genocide. On the other side
of this diplomatic battle, the modern Turkish
government actively and vehemently denies that
the SAFO constitutes a genocide. The source notes
an interesting distinction. While Turkey has
a highly vocal, incredibly structured campaign
denying the Armenian Genocide, the government
generally prefers to avoid discussing the SAFO
altogether. When pressed on the international
stage, or when justifications are offered by
those denying the genocide label, they frequently
point to the armed military resistance by some
Assyrian groups. They cite the Highland tribe's
formal declaration of war in Hakkari, or the
armed violent defenses in villages like Hazak.
arguing that the Ottoman state was responding
to an active military rebellion and a security
threat, rather than conducting a systematic,
unprovoked extermination of a civilian population.
It's a profound, open historical fracture. As
we've seen throughout this analysis, it involves
incredibly dense layers of imperial ambition,
localized bureaucratic brutality, the desperate
complexities of armed resistance, and the lingering,
heavily politicized scars of memory and state
denial. It truly is. To briefly recap the immense
ground we've covered today, we started in the
incredibly isolated 13 ,000 foot peaks of the
Hakkari Mountains, where the Ottoman milit system
kept an ancient people politically divided. We
watched as the paranoid geopolitical chess match
of World War One turned their mountain fortress
into a deadly crossfire sparked by a single telegram
from Talat Pasha that tried to limit their very
existence to isolated groups of 20. We tracked
the devastating localized spread of the massacres
across Persia. Bitlis, and D .R. Becker, led
by rogue governors and self -proclaimed butcher
battalions. And we examine the complex, morally
gray reality of fierce armed resistance, a tragic
cycle of inter -ethnic retaliation in Urmia,
and the harrowing, fatal exile to the refugee
camps of Bakba. We analyzed a deeply volatile
period where the map of the Middle East was redrawn
in blood, leaving a legacy that is still being
debated in parliaments around the world a century
later. Thank you, listener, for joining us on
this incredibly complex and heavy historical
journey. But before we close the book on today's
deep dive, I want to leave you with one final
lingering thought to mull over on your own. It's
an important one. We talked about how the physical
records of the Assyrian people, like the irreplaceable
rare manuscripts in the Diocese of Surt, were
purposefully burned and destroyed by advancing
forces. complete cultural erasure. Because of
that massive destruction, the memory of the SAFO
wasn't preserved in textbooks or official state
archives for decades. It was kept alive entirely
through oral traditions, whispered stories and
lamentations passed down from the traumatized
survivors to their grandchildren in the diaspora.
Through the generations. I want you to consider
this. When the physical evidence of a people's
history is systematically erased by an empire,
How does the simple, deeply human act of singing
a folk song or telling a story to your grandchild
become the ultimate act of historical defiance?
Wow. Till next time, keep diving deep.