Assyrians, Kurds, and Ottomans: Intercommunal Relations on the Pe ...

After the Massacre of Tekhoma

Rassam informed Wellesley that if the Porte wished to take any step against the Kurdish leader, then the Jacobites of Tur Abdin, who occupied a district stretching between Mardin and al Jazirah, would be useful, as they had been for the campaign of the former al Sadir al A‘dham Mohammed Rashid Pasha in 1834–1838 during the last Kurdish war. They were able to muster a large number of fighters, and fifteen thousand of them would join in the final campaign against Bedr Khan.

Rassam also mentioned that those who had just arrived from Tiyari and Tekhoma had informed him that the massacre of the women and children had been disgusting. In one of the villages, the scene in the river was unspeakable: the bodies of the victims had been thrown into the water, which consequently was no longer fit for use. In the same dispatch, he put the human loss at four thousand persons killed. Zenal Beg had stripped the people of Tiyari of all their possessions, including their stocks of food, and threatened them, saying he would ‘starve them to death’. He had also issued orders to prevent them from going to Mosul and threatened any who defied them with execution.²³

8. The Sufferings of Mar Shimun

As has been mentioned, Mar Shimun had fled from his homeland and taken refuge in the British consulate at Mosul. His correspondence with the British authorities in Mosul and Constantinople shows him constantly begging them to interfere on behalf of his people and to help them to return to their homeland after their eviction by the invading Kurdish troops. But the long years that he spent in Mosul appealing and begging produced no positive result. At first the patriarch seems to have been convinced that Great Britain would help his people to return to their homes and that he would then be able to resume his civil and religious authority. But political and military conditions in the region were moving steadily towards eliminating the leaders of the independent centres, and the patriarch’s turn was approaching.