Title:THE SIMELE MASSACRE AS A CAUSE OF IRAQI NATIONALISM:
HOW AN ASSYRIAN GENOCIDE CREATED IRAQI MARTIAL NATIONALISM
Author: Russell A. Hopkins
Place of publication: US
Publisher: University of Akron
Release date: 2016
Following the First World War, the British relocated the Assyrian Christian community of the Hakkari mountains to the Simele region in northern Iraq. Their close association with the British caused the Sunni Arab power structure to view the Hakkari Assyrians and other Iraqi Assyrian communities as a foreign threat within the newly established kingdom, despite the fact that Assyrians were native to the general area. The British used Assyrian soldiers to protect British military assets in northern Iraq. That created animosity in the local Kurdish and Arab communities and the Sunni Arab state. In 1933, an armed Assyrian group unsuccessfully attempted to emigrate to Syria. On their return to Simele, they engaged an Iraqi Army detachment in an armed skirmish. That engagement provided the pretext for a massacre against the Simele Assyrians while the state orchestrated a larger genocidal campaign against Assyrian communities in the general Mosul area. The military actions against a perceived internal, foreign threat caused the army to become the central focus of a martial Iraqi nationalism and the main basis for the Iraqi state. British primary sources discuss the mass violence and note the rising prominence of the army as a nationalist instrument. Significantly, Arab nationalist writers declined to discuss the genocide, indicating awareness and implicit denial of the violence and an effort to suppress its significance in the construction of the Sunni Arab national identity. That suppression of evidence shows consciousness of the necessity of the genocidal campaign for development of the martial nationalistic state as it actually occurred.. [1]