00:00In 1915, one of the oldest civilizations on earth was almost wiped off the map.
00:04And the world barely noticed.
00:07They were called the Assyrians.
00:09Their ancestors built one of the first great empires in Mesopotamia.
00:12Their language, Aramaic, was the language Jesus Christ spoke.
00:16They were among the very first peoples on earth to convert to Christianity,
00:19and they kept that faith for 2000 years.
00:22By the start of the 20th century,
00:24about 600,000 Assyrians lived in the mountainous southeast of the Ottoman Empire,
00:27in what is now southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and the mountains near the Iranian border.
00:32Some of their villages sat higher than 4000 meters.
00:35For centuries, they lived quietly, guarding their ancient churches on land they had held for millennia.
00:40But an empire does not allow anyone to live quietly.
00:43In 1912, the Ottomans were crushed in the Balkan Wars.
00:47They lost vast territories.
00:49A flood of Muslim refugees poured into Anatolia, and panic spread through the ruling class.
00:54Out of that fear rose a nationalist movement known as the Young Turks,
00:57and they had one core belief, Turkey belongs to the Turks.
01:01Every non-Muslim minority was a threat inside the body of the empire.
01:04And the Assyrians were the easiest target of all.
01:07In August 1914, the First World War began.
01:10The Ottoman Empire declared conscription.
01:13Assyrians were ordered to report for military service.
01:16But they knew it was not service.
01:18It was death.
01:20Christians who were drafted were not allowed to fight.
01:22They were sent to labor battalions, digging trenches, hauling supplies, building roads, all under armed guard.
01:29Thousands of Assyrians refused.
01:30They fled into the mountains.
01:32And that was exactly the excuse the government wanted.
01:35The Ottomans immediately declared the Assyrians traitors.
01:39They even fabricated evidence that Christians were hiding weapons.
01:42The hunt for deserters turned into the slaughter of civilians.
01:45Dozens of villages in the Hikari Mountains were burned to the ground overnight.
01:49On October 26, 1914, the Ottoman Interior Minister, Talat Pasha, sent a telegram ordering the deportation of every Assyrian in
01:56the Hikari region.
01:58Historians marked that telegram as the beginning of the Sifo, the Assyrian genocide.
02:02From there, the killing spread like wildfire.
02:05Between January and May of 1915, Ottoman forces invaded the province of Azerbaijan in Persia, butchering Assyrian Christian villages along
02:12the way without distinction.
02:14When Russian troops briefly occupied some Assyrian towns, the Ottomans took them back and the revenge grew even more savage.
02:20It did not matter whether you had cooperated with the Russians.
02:23If you were Assyrian, you died.
02:26Retreating soldiers took out their rage on every village they passed.
02:29They killed everyone they saw.
02:31They burned everything they found.
02:33In mid-1915, the slaughter entered its darkest phase.
02:37The Ottoman army joined forces with Kurdish tribal militias and launched a full assault on the Assyrian tribes of the
02:42Hikari Mountains.
02:43The Assyrians organized an armed resistance, but by September they had been driven from the land their families had held
02:48for generations.
02:49And that was when true hell arrived.
02:51The governor of the region was a man named Memd Rashid, a trained physician.
02:56When someone asked him how a doctor could kill so many people, his answer was chilling.
03:00The Armenians and other Christians are the diseased germs of this nation, he said.
03:04And killing germs is a doctor's duty.
03:07Rashid assembled death squads made up mostly of Circassians.
03:10The Ottoman government even allocated 500 Ottoman lira as a budget for the operation.
03:15He ordered artillery to level Assyrian strongholds.
03:18He used militia to hunt down anyone who resisted.
03:20Even the central Ottoman government eventually told him to stop killing Assyrians and focus his energy on the Armenians instead.
03:27He simply ignored the order.
03:29On March 3, 1918, a more devastating blow fell.
03:33The supreme spiritual leader of the Assyrian church, the 21-year-old patriarch Mar Shimon 19, was invited to what
03:39he believed was a peace negotiation in Salmas, Iran.
03:42The Kurdish chieftain Simcoe Shekak invited him under a flag of truce.
03:46He shook the patriarch's hand, calmly, and then as the young leader turned to climb into his carriage, Simcoe shot
03:51him in the back.
03:52150 members of the patriarch's guard were gunned down at the same moment by snipers hidden on the rooftops.
03:58In a single act of betrayal, a people lost their spiritual heart.
04:01When the war ended, the Assyrians submitted their casualty report to the 1919 peace conference, 250,000 dead.
04:07By the 1923 Lausanne conference, they had revised the figure upward to 275,000.
04:14Researchers today believe the real number is closer to 300,000, because so many Assyrians lived side by side with
04:20Armenians and were simply counted together as, Christians.
04:22Of the 600,000 Assyrians alive before the war, at least half were gone.
04:27But the nightmare was not over.
04:29In August 1933, in the newly independent kingdom of Iraq, the Kurdish general Bakr Sidki led the Iraqi army against
04:35the Assyrians of the Simile region in the north.
04:38It was another massacre.
04:40Soldiers went house to house.
04:42Men were dragged out and machine gunned.
04:44Bodies were lined up and driven over with armored cars to make sure they were dead.
04:48In one room alone, more than 80 Assyrians of the Baz tribe were executed at once.
04:52Over 60 Assyrian villages were emptied.
04:55And when it was over, Bakr Sidki returned to Baghdad to a hero's welcome.
04:59That massacre, at Simile, directly gave birth to a word.
05:03A Jewish-Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin, horrified by what had happened to the Assyrians and the Armenians, invented a
05:09new term, genocide.
05:10That word was later written into the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
05:15Genocide.
05:16One people's catastrophe created the law meant to protect all peoples.
05:20But here is the bitter irony.
05:21To this day, the Assyrian genocide is still not officially recognized by most of the world's governments.
05:27The Armenian genocide has been acknowledged by more than 30 countries.
05:31The Assyrian Sifo has been recognized by only a handful.
05:34In 2019, a United States Senate resolution finally mentioned the Assyrians by name, 104 years after the killing had begun.
05:42Today, only about 3 million Assyrians remain on earth, scattered across the United States, Australia, Sweden, and Germany, far from
05:49their ancestral homeland.
05:50Their ancestors spoke the language of Jesus.
05:53They built one of humanity's first empires.
05:56They carried their faith for 2,000 years.
05:58And all of it came within a breath of being erased forever.
06:02In Aramaic, the word for sword also carries another meaning, not just slaughter, but extinction.
06:073,000 years of civilization should not be cut short by a sword.
06:11And it should not be killed a second time by the silence of the world.
06:18For this vide, if you were to find a family of mine, we have never seen the name of the
06:18world before.
06:18And we're going to pray for a second time by after going after you.
06:19And we're going to stay here and find a second time by theõi.
06:30In Aramaic, the word for faith, will be created by theoui.
06:32And it will lead to the culture of the people who have been taken.
06:33We've been attacked by theoui as a government nation.
06:34The people have been violated in the country as a country.
06:37And the city has been transformed.
06:38The people that have been turned around during the past,
