The anatomy of erasure: Indigenous Assyrian women and forgotten genocide

Global Voices published an essay by JR Younan examining the erasure of Assyrians, an Indigenous people from West Asia, from historical memory and international protection. The piece centers on the 1933 Simele massacre in Iraq, when the Iraqi army, aided by Kurdish tribes, killed thousands of Assyrians in a state-organized campaign the Iraqi government has never officially acknowledged, and situates it alongside the earlier Ottoman-led Sayfo genocide of 1915, which the author says wiped out roughly seventy-five percent of the population. According to the piece, sexual violence against Assyrian women and girls has functioned as a tool of that destruction, yet unlike Armenian survivors, who were aided by Treaty of Sèvres-era tracing efforts and League of Nations searches, Assyrian women were never given comparable mechanisms for documentation or recovery. The essay frames this as a threefold erasure — as an Indigenous people, through gendered violence, and through archival silence — as the community approaches Assyrian Martyrs' Day on August seventh.

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