The anatomy of erasure: Indigenous Assyrian women and forgotten genocide

Sexual violence, state denial, and archival silence: three systems that work to disappear an Indigenous people

Originally published on Global Voices

By JR Younan

This post is part of Global Voices’ August 2026 Spotlight series, “Indigenous Rights.” This series offers insight into the lives and experiences of Indigenous peoples, to build connections across regions, center Indigenous experiences, and share the stories of leaders, activists, and community members, and more. You can support this coverage by donating here.

I was 11 years old the first time I was told Assyrians don’t exist by a friend. I got home, slumped on a stool and snapped open a packet of prawn cocktail crisps. 

Assyrians are an Indigenous ethnic group from West Asia, tracing our ancestry to an ancient people. Parts of Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq make up our homeland. We speak the Neo-Aramaic Assyrian language. While predominantly Christian, we maintain ancient cultural traditions such as Akitu and Musarda. 

Intuition on full alert, it didn’t take my mother long to wheedle out what was troubling me that day. With dill splayed across a chopping board, she told me about the Simele massacre for the first time.

The Simele Massacre

The massacre took place in 1933. The Iraqi army, with the assistance of Kurdish tribes, executed an attack on the town of Simele and surrounding districts inhabited by Assyrians. It was a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, with extensive propaganda unleashed beforehand by the state to sour public opinion, describing us as “foreign” and “colonial agents.” 

In the massacre’s prelude, Assyrian men were forcibly disarmed while Arab families received evacuation notices. The British administration in Iraq, aware of the impending violence, remained inactive. Thousands of Assyrians were killed in the violence that followed, and afterwards public celebrations were held; according to some accounts, some even commemorated with watermelons carved to resemble skulls. The army commander who led the operations, Bakr Sidqi, became a national hero. The Iraqi state has never officially acknowledged the massacre.

On August 7, we commemorate Assyrian Martyrs’ Day, founded for those who lost their lives at Simele but which now encompasses remembrance for all Assyrians who have been persecuted. 

Hearing about Simele was a gut punch. As I immersed myself in our contemporary history, its cyclical nature was apparent: genocides, displacement and the eternal lack of accountability. One aspect proved especially resonant: the plight of Assyrian women and girls. 

I saw the same pattern: girls taken from their homes, women disappearing without a trace, families left searching for answers that never came. Within our families, they live on anecdotally: a sister escaping, an aunt resisting. But how many were they? What were their names? What became of them afterwards?

An invisible people

No constitution in the Middle East recognises Assyrians as an Indigenous people. We remain one of the most socio-politically disenfranchised groups. Both the Western and the Eastern gaze have been confined to majority demographic groups. Assyrians have scarcely warranted a footnote. The unrecognised Ottoman-led 1915 genocide (known as “Sayfo” — “sword” in Aramaic) wiped out approximately 75 percent of our population.

The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO) warns that land theft, security threats and diminishing political status continue to drive our exodus. In West Asia, we are the marginalised of the marginalised, so where does that leave our women and girls? 

Sexual violence as a tool of genocide

Genocide scholarship increasingly understands sexual violence as an instrument of destruction. Abducted women and girls, rape, forced conversions and marriages fracture family structures; women are the custodians of continuity, preserving family recipes, cultural rituals and folklore, while being the first voice through which a child hears their mother tongue. 

Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who devised the term “genocide” in 1944, and whose thinking was shaped by the Simele Massacre, argued that genocide is not simply the killing of a people or removal from their lands. It is the destruction of a group’s social existence. Gendered violence is central to that process, reverberating across generations. Lest we forget the women and girls to whom this happened. It is impossible to comprehend how they lived with what followed. The violence did not end when the rape ended or when their names were changed. It endured for the rest of their lives. How do we even begin to measure that? 

I spoke to a British-Arab journalist about discrimination faced by Assyrians in Iraq. He dismissed it, citing his Assyrian great-grandmother from Simele. He knew nothing of the massacre, nor was he interested in learning. It was bizarre: an Arab man claiming an Assyrian lineage while remaining entirely oblivious to the violence that may have produced it. 

Historical absence

Outside of our own communal memory, these women and girls are largely absent in academia. Their violation has been threefold: first as Indigenous people, then through sexual violence and finally by the archival silence that follows. If it’s not written down in the history books, it never happened — the culmination of ethnic cleansing through the manipulation of collective memory. 

This silence is not universal. Following the 1915 genocide, international legal frameworks such as the Treaty of Sèvres required the Turkish government to co-operate with investigations into missing Armenian women and girls and assist in locating them. Humanitarian organisations such as the Aleppo Rescue Home and Near East Relief facilitated family tracing. The League of Nations commissioned searches for the missing up until the 1930s, accompanied by meticulous archival documentation.   

This is, as it should be. Assyrian women and girls were never afforded the same mechanisms for identification, documentation or recovery. Whilst there are details recorded on Assyrian persecution by the British and missionary organisations, they are scant. As a transnational people divided across arbitrarily drawn borders, Assyrians faced challenges in establishing cohesive institutions and political representation, unlike Armenians who, despite a substantial diaspora, have benefited from the leverage provided by being a state-bearing nation. 

Assyrians have traditionally been geopolitically powerless; amidst the fledgling post-war struggle for hegemony over oil resources, it is little wonder we inspired no assistance.

A glib justification has been our smaller numbers. However, just over a century ago Assyrians were the majority demographic across much of our homeland. West Asian states have spent the last century rebranding Assyrians as everything other than Assyrian through forced assimilation, state classification (Arab, Semitic Turk, Kurdish Christian) and sectarian divisions sown by late 19th-century missionaries that resulted in religious-affiliated identifiers emerging instead of Assyrian. These factors have all contributed to a gross underestimation of our population and, by extension, impact on our communities.

Current minority status should not lessen our importance socio-politically and historically; on the contrary, it elevates it, demanding interrogation as to why we have become a minority in the first instance — why an Indigenous people, whose presence stretches across millennia, could within a century face the prospect of disappearance from their ancestral homelands.

Not to downplay efforts within our own community at historical preservation. Organisations such as Seyfo Centre, Assyrian Studies Association and Assyrian Genocide Studies have begun addressing these historiographical lacunae, with the latter archiving women’s accounts. Yet these are relatively recent endeavours, the onus always being on Assyrians themselves, sustained mainly through volunteer goodwill.

Ongoing gendered violence

The rise of Islamic State (ISIS) brought renewed persecution, as Assyrian communities were targeted through killings, displacement, and the abduction and enslavement of women and girls. Western media and liberal discourse have devoted considerable attention to centering the experiences of ISIS “brides,” invariably portrayed as victims despite growing evidence illustrating many were not passive actors. 

Yet the actual women victims of ISIS have been largely neglected. During an all-women’s panel on intersectional feminism, I highlighted this double standard. Rather than engagement, Assyrian testimony was dismissed as Islamophobic and nationalist and exposed the limits of widespread binary political discourse.

Yazidi people have, rightly so, received international advocacy for the crimes committed by ISIS against their women and girls. Their persecution was rapidly framed internationally as a genocide against a distinct ethnoreligious minority. 

Assyrians were subsumed within broader narratives of Christian persecution. This categorisation has obscured Assyrian ethnicity and the specific gendered experiences, compounded by the fact that a predominantly secular West has viewed Christianity as a trait of the right wing, which may have contributed to reduced recognition.

It would be naïve to ignore potential stigma surrounding experiences of sexual violence. Fear of shame and social repercussions can hinder survivors’ testimony, as well as the intergenerational consequences, particularly within West Asian legal and social frameworks where children born of rape inherit the perpetrator’s religious identity rather than that of their mother. 

Continued loss

Having performed within West Asian spaces, some audience members would approach me. Their stories were uncannily similar. Raised as Arabs, many only discovered as adults that their mothers were Assyrian. They spoke of mothers forbidden from speaking Assyrian, of fathers dismissing Assyrian identity as “minority mentality,” and of estrangement from maternal families. 

I am not suggesting these women lacked agency in their marriages, nor am I equating these experiences with the sexual violence discussed. Rather, I am highlighting a disproportionate burden placed upon women to relinquish their language, culture, and identity to assimilate into the identity of their husbands upheld by patriarchal West Asian status laws. Time and again, people felt compelled to tell me these stories because they sensed something had been lost, even if they couldn’t always name it. 

Remembrance

My great-great-aunt, Sorayya was a survivor of Seyfo. She lived with us for a time when I was a child. She was full of stories. She spoke about travelling to Jerusalem, knocking back a whisky before getting a tattoo of a cross, masquerading as a soldier to prank neighbours and the adventures she had as a nanny for an American ambassador in Baghdad — but never Seyfo. 

By the time I understood that these silences were part of the story, it was too late. She was no longer alive for me to ask. As older generations pass away, opportunities to preserve first-hand and inherited memories of Assyrian women and girls erode. There are limitations to our remembrance, of course; being the least we can offer, it is incomplete, constrained by the stories that were never told, by those whose names were lost, with lives that were disrupted and the justice that remains unresolved.