Among the most important factors that led to the weakness of our intellectual and political movements, and to our failure to realize our great, well-known projects, is that we have not concerned ourselves with studying the history of our countries—neither its ancient nor its modern part. Responsibility for this grave neglect falls upon all of our elites, in both their governmental and their oppositional wings. What made the situation still worse is that this historical indifference remained accompanied by the dominance of "ethnic-nationalist" historical conceptions that do not recognize our national particularities or the unity of our historical and civilizational identity, but instead divided the one people into "nationalities and national minorities," each with its own "racial origins" and differing histories, joined by no national common ground except the "will of colonialism" to cram us into an "artificial" state—as the progressive nationalist theses, still dominant to this day, have taught us.

We have chosen the recently published book "al-Qusara fi Nakabat al-Nasara" (The Utmost Account of the Calamities of the Christians) as an example of the extent of our neglect in studying our history, even its recent part. Although the first edition of this book appeared in the year 1919, in its republication now in a new edition there are many benefits bearing directly on the present political conditions and on the projects concerning the region of the "Iraqi-Levantine" Mashriq and the Middle East as a whole. Acquaintance with the details of the tragic events suffered by the Christian Syriacs in the region of Upper Mesopotamia—currently under Turkey—is of use in correcting our positions on numerous current issues, among them:

First: the Kurdish question in Iraq and its ramifications in both Turkey and Syria.

Second: the question of the historical Christian presence in the Mashriq and its entanglement with the political and international conflicts that have been raging since the last century down to the present.

Third: the ambitions and claims of Turkey to many regions historically and demographically bound to Iraq and Syria—Turkey's claim to the Wilaya (province) of Mosul, and then the claim of the Kurdish nationalist movements to what is called "Greater Kurdistan," which encompasses many Iraqi and Syrian regions; in addition to the question of the right of Syria and Iraq to the "humanitarian and cultural" defense of the inhabitants of the region of Upper Mesopotamia—Kurdistan-Turkey—among the Syriacs and the Arabs, as brothers of ours in history, civilization, and the land of Mesopotamia.

So that the reader may grasp the magnitude of the massacres and ethnic cleansings that took place in this region, we record here some of the figures given in the book:

Until the beginning of this century, the whole region of Upper Mesopotamia—"present-day Turkish Kurdistan"—was inhabited by about "a million" Syriacs, of whom no more than four thousand souls now remain, after the massacres, the displacement, and the forced change of religion.

The city of Diyarbakir ("Amid in Syriac") was inhabited by "35" thousand souls, among them 4,130 Kurds. 5,394 Syriacs were killed and the rest displaced or forced to change their creed, so that it has now become a purely Kurdish city.

The region of the Hakkari mountains was inhabited by about 150 thousand Syriacs ("Assyrian Nestorians"); after the massacres, which cost about ten thousand dead, all the Syriacs were displaced—to Urmia [?] in Iran, to Russia, and to Iraq. This region is now purely Kurdish.

The region of Jazirat Ibn Umar was inhabited by 1,250 Syriac families, of whom no more than fifty individuals remained after the massacres. The entire region has now been transformed into a Kurdish one.

We would add that these massacres were, in truth, directed in the first place against the Armenians, whom they cost about a million dead, along with the displacement of the survivors and their forced change of religion, so that the entire region of historical Armenia ("around Lake Van")—which overlaps with the region of Upper Mesopotamia and is now also considered part of Turkish Kurdistan—was Kurdified and Turkified.

The first and most direct importance of this book remains its capacity to awaken memory regarding events and scandals that differed little from what befell the Palestinian people—indeed, in many cases surpassing the tragedy of Palestine in the intensity of its violence, its killing, and its brutality. What matters here is that the Christian Syriac people who suffered these atrocities is not a people foreign to us, the sons of the Mashriq. It is not merely a neighboring people with whom we are bound by long human and historical ties, as is the case with the Armenian people, for example. Rather, the Syriac people—by every national measure and norm—is a true part of both the Iraqi and the Syrian peoples, in every respect: geographical, historical, cultural, and even racial and ethnic.

The absence of any mention of the suffering of this wronged people from the history books and from political education is a matter that calls for astonishment and questioning. But whoever knows the truth of our ancient and modern history realizes that most of it is a distorted history imposed upon us by the Orientalists "and their disciples" among the followers of the "racial-nationalist, atavistic" conceptions that cut our history into scattered pieces and tore our peoples apart into competing "nationalities" with nothing to unite them. As for the Syriacs, for example, it seems that the direct reason that made our states and our educated and erring [?] elites collude in the practice of silence and forgetting regarding this crime and those responsible for it—"among the Ottomans and the Kurdish aghas [?]"—the reason for this silence lies essentially in the subjection of our states and our elites, after the First World War, to the influences and decisions of the English and French colonial powers that dominated the Mashriq.

The treaties that these colonial powers concluded with the Atatürkist Turkish state included, above all, an agreement to turn this black page concerning the catastrophe that befell the Syriacs ("and likewise with regard to the Armenians").

On this basis, any mention of this crime was completely effaced from the history books, from political discourse, and from all research and studies concerning the modern history of the region. Even the books and testimonies that many Westerners had previously published were suppressed. Our states and our elites adopted this policy of silence and suppression without realizing that it is, in truth, against their own interests. Add to this the decisive role of the Zionist forces, which have contributed and still contribute to this suppression, because the elimination of the Christian presence in the Mashriq is one of the aims of Zionism and Israel.

As for the region of "Upper Mesopotamia," in which the tragedy of the "Christian Syriacs" took place, whoever examines closely the present map that brings together Syria, Iraq, and Turkey will notice that the upper course of the two rivers ("the Tigris and the Euphrates")—the portion extending west of Iraq—belongs to Syria, while the uppermost part now belongs to Turkey, where the two rivers descend through this region of Upper Mesopotamia, which is now called "southeastern Turkey" or "Turkish Kurdistan," after it officially became part of Turkey following the First World War.

This region of Upper Mesopotamia contains several well-known historical cities and areas, such as Tur Abdin, Mardin, Edessa ("Urfa today"), Harran, Nisibis, and Diyarbakir ("Midyat"). All these cities and regions were, from the dawn of history until the First World War, part of the civilization and population of Mesopotamia in both its Iraqi and Syrian parts, throughout all the ages—Sumerian, Assyrian-Babylonian, Persian, Arab, and even Ottoman. The historical and civilizational importance of this region lies in the fact that it is geographically regarded as the meeting-point of the fundamental homelands of which the Middle East is composed: the Caucasus, Armenia, Anatolia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Among the hypotheses about the origin of the "Sumerians" is that they descended from this region of Upper Mesopotamia toward southern Iraq, where they founded their well-known states and civilization.

Moreover, the importance of this region is that it played a decisive role in the formation of the "shared Mashriqi identity," for it constituted the meeting-point of the two civilizations, the Iraqi (Mesopotamian) and the Levantine Canaanite. For it was through Upper Mesopotamia that, throughout history, the Semitic ("Levantine") groups, as well as the Caucasian-Armenian groups, continued to descend from the upper reaches of the two rivers to the rest of Iraq, as far as the south. We note, for example, that the Aramaic-Syriac language set out from this region in the first millennium BC, because it was able to combine the two sister tongues, Iraqi Akkadian and Syrian Canaanite. This new Aramaic language was able to impose itself and become the language of culture for all the inhabitants of the Mashriq, because it adopted the easily taught Phoenician alphabet in place of the arduous, complex cuneiform script.

This region too—and in particular the two cities of "Edessa and Nisibis"—played a decisive role in the history of Christianity, for from the first century AD it became an active ecclesiastical and cultural center for spreading Christianity to the rest of Iraq and the Mashriq, and to the whole Caucasus and Asia, as far as Iran, Turkestan, India, and China. With the spread of Christianity, the dialect of this region turned into the standard, classical Syriac language, to become the language of all the churches of the Mashriq and the foremost cultural language of the Sasanian Persian Empire. This region of Upper Mesopotamia was, in most cases, bound—civilizationally, religiously, and administratively—to Syria more than to Iraq, as was the case, for example, in the Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, and Ottoman ages, until it was annexed to Turkey after the First World War. We note, for example, that the Christianity that spread in this region belonged to the Syrian Syriac (Jacobite) Church, while the Iraqi Church ("Nestorian—the Church of Babylon") was centered throughout present-day Iraq ("in addition to Ahwaz, which currently belongs to Iran"), together with the adjoining regions belonging to Nineveh, such as the region of the Hakkari mountains ("in present-day Turkey"). In the Arab Islamic era, this region produced many well-known geniuses, especially in the two sciences of astronomy and medicine inherited from the sciences of the Babylonians, such as Thabit ibn Qurra al-Harrani, and his son Sinan, and Muhammad Abd al-Rahman al-Mardini, and Sibt al-Mardini, as well as Ayyub al-Ruhawi (of Edessa), and Sergius of Reshaina (Ras al-Ayn) [?], and dozens of names that played a clear role in the flourishing of civilization in Baghdad.

It seems that after the Islamic conquest and the formation of the Arab Empire, the Syriacs of this region began to experience a new predicament. By virtue of the elevated, mountainous nature of this region, the greater part of the population was able to preserve their religion and their Syriac language, after the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the Mashriq had converted to Islam and been Arabized. This region was regarded as one of the "thughur" (frontier marches)—that is, the front facing the Christian Byzantine state in Anatolia ("present-day Turkey"). The Syrian "Orthodox" doctrine that the "Syriacs" of this region continued to embrace distinguished them entirely from Byzantine Christianity, which had practiced repression against them since the first century AD. From the tenth century AD, an alliance [?] arose between the Kurdish tribes dwelling in the surrounding Kurdish mountain regions and the Turkestani tribes newly arrived from Central Asia, supported by the Abbasid state and by the Islamic emirates founded at that time. In the name of combating Christian Byzantine influence, the Turkestani tribes were able to exercise their control and spread throughout these regions, at the expense of the Syriacs. The processes of "Kurdification and Turkification" passed through periods and waves differing in their harshness and degree of violence. Yet despite this, until the last century an important part of the population—perhaps reaching half—remained in their Syriac Christianity, spread across many villages and towns, joined by other Christian minorities of Armenians coming from the neighboring region of Armenia ("around Lake Van"). As for the remaining half of the region's inhabitants, they were Muslims, the majority of them Kurds, with an important presence of Arabs as well as Turks.

To be continued in the next issue.