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

As early as December 1843, Brant, the British consul at Erzeroom, reporting to Canning on the subject of the attacks on the Assyrian tribes, had urgently requested an immediate campaign to subdue this rebellious leader: ‘[T]here is no alternative to the military campaign to subdue the Kurdish leaders who live in the neighbourhood of the Nestorians to the Sultan’s authority’.⁵

Bedr Khan’s policy towards both the Christians and the Yazidis in Tur Abdin also drew much attention and observation from British diplomats. Rassam reported that the region was chiefly inhabited by Yazidis, Kurds, and Christian Jacobites, who had lived in virtual independence until the campaign of the former al Sadr al Ahdam Mohammed Rashid Pasha, who had subdued them. But after he came to dominate the region in 1840, Bedr Khan had pursued his policy of imposing Islam on all the non-Muslim inhabitants. Accordingly Tur Abdin underwent demographic changes, as Bedr Khan encouraged the oppressed Kurds living under the rule of Beirakdar and other Turkish rulers to abandon their villages and to settle there, where the living conditions were much better than under direct Turkish rule. The newcomers, however, settled in depopulated villages that the Kurdish leader Mir Koor of Rawanduz had devastated earlier. The improved conditions did not apply to the Christians or Yazidis of Tur Abdin but were limited to Muslims only. Badger, who had passed through Tur Abdin and al Jazirah late in 1842, saw the tragic life of the Christians, who were then so demoralised that they were hardly able to open their mouths and could only whisper when they wished to talk.⁶ The policy of compulsory conversion was attested throughout 360 Christian villages in Tur Abdin, which had belonged entirely to the Syrian Orthodox Church, as Rassam reported in 1844.

Rassam also reported that a Syrian Orthodox bishop from Mosul was on a pastoral visit to the region of Tur Abdin, where the people begged him to refer their suffering to the pasha of Mosul and appeal for his intervention.⁷ Their condition was also the subject of complaint by two Kurdish leaders who arrived at Mosul and submitted a letter to Kemal Effendi (the sultan’s envoy) describing the atrocities that Bedr Khan Beg and Noor Allah Beg were committing against the Christians.⁸