How Did the Simele Massacre Unfold?

The Disaster and Its Immediate Cause

In August 1933, soldiers of the newly independent Kingdom of Iraq killed more than 3,000 Assyrian civilians in and around the village of Simele in the country's north. The killing spread across 54 villages over four days, driven by an army column under Kurdish general Bakr Sidqi that had been sent north to put down what officials called an Assyrian revolt. Most of the dead were Christians of the Assyrian Church of the East whose families had already survived the 1915 Assyrian genocide under the Ottomans and had been resettled in Iraq by British administrators barely a decade earlier, after 1921.

The Assyrian community today observes the anniversary as Martyrs Day, a national day of mourning that keeps the memory of Simele alive outside academic history. The massacre also left a mark far beyond Iraq's borders. Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin later pointed to the killings at Simele as one of the events that pushed him to define the crime he would eventually name genocide, a word that entered international law within Lemkin's own lifetime and that historians still use to describe Simele itself, nearly a century after Bakr Sidqi's soldiers moved north into Assyrian villages in 1933.

First Reports From the Scene

The violence traced back to a border crossing three weeks earlier. On 21 July 1933, more than 600 armed Assyrians led by former Levies officer Malik Yaqo crossed into French-mandate Syria seeking asylum, hoping to establish an autonomous Assyrian enclave in the north. French authorities disarmed the group and refused them entry, sending them back into Iraq on 4 August. Attempting to surrender to the Iraqi army while crossing the Tigris near the village of Dirabun, the group instead clashed with an Iraqi brigade; the Iraqis lost 33 soldiers in the fighting, and the Assyrians retreated back across the border once Iraqi aircraft arrived overhead. The British Administrative Inspector for Mosul, Lieutenant-colonel R. R. Stafford, later wrote that the Assyrians had not sought the clash, while Iraqi historian Khaldun Husry blamed Yaqo's men for provoking it at Dirabun in 1933.

Rumors of atrocities at Dirabun, some invented, spread through the Iraqi newspaper press and inflamed public opinion against Assyrian Christians generally. Bakr Sidqi's forces moved north from Mosul, and from 8 August 1933 they began executing Assyrian men found in the Bekher region between Zakho and Duhok, trucking civilians in groups of eight or ten to remote sites where they were shot with machine guns. Thousands of Assyrians fleeing the killing converged on Simele, where officials had told them they would be safe under the Iraqi flag; instead the army, which had disarmed the town on 8 and 9 August, turned on the refugees gathered there.

Rescue, Response, and Fallout

While the killing at Simele was underway, Iraqi authorities encouraged neighboring Kurdish, Arab, and Yazidi tribes to loot Assyrian property. The Kurdish tribes of Gulli, Sindi, and Selivani were encouraged by the mayor of Zakho to loot villages northeast of Simele, while Arab tribes of Shammar and Jubur crossed the Tigris on 9 August 1933 to raid Assyrian villages further south. More than 60 Assyrian villages were looted in total across the Dohuk Governorate; some men caught in the raids were shot, women and children more often reached neighboring settlements, and many of the emptied villages were later resettled by Kurds in the years after 1933.

The massacre hardened the naming dispute within the Assyrian community and accelerated emigration from Iraq in the decades that followed. It also fed directly into Raphael Lemkin's postwar legal work, which cited the killing of Assyrians in Iraq alongside the Armenian genocide as evidence that international law needed a specific crime for the destruction of a people. In 2021, Congresswoman Debbie Lesko introduced H.R. 143 in the United States House of Representatives, a resolution urging official American recognition of the Simele massacre, though the resolution has not yet passed into United States policy nearly a century after the killings.

The Questions the Disaster Left Behind

Simele is unusual among mass killings of its era for how directly it can be traced from a single border skirmish at Dirabun to a coordinated four-day campaign against civilians, and then forward into the language international law still uses today. The massacre did not end with a trial or a treaty in 1933; the closest it came to a lasting consequence was a word, coined a decade later by Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer who studied Simele closely enough to build a legal case around it, and whose word still names atrocities committed against civilian populations around the world.

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