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Chapters 9 and 10 recount how the Ottomans determined to bring the independent Assyrians and nearby Kurds under central gov-ernment control, leading to the deaths of thousands of Assyrians in campaigns by Kurdish tribes under Badr Khan Beg with Ottoman ac-quiescence. Chapters 11 and 12 describe the final siege of the inde-pendent Assyrian tribes and British efforts to urge the Ottomans to put down the Kurdish tribes under Badr Khan Beg. Ultimately the Ottomans and a rival Kurdish leader prevailed in 1847, ending the ‘Kurdish war’.
This work provokes new questions that may give rise to further research. How, for example, did the independent Assyr-ian tribes and the Church of the East manage to carve out a zone of autonomy so close to the Ottoman vilayet of Mosul, not to mention Persia? Why were the independent Assyrian tribes caught off guard and deported from their lands so easily in the 1830s and 1840s, after resisting centuries of such attacks by their local rivals? How did the Jacobite Assyrians of southeastern Anatolia and the Chaldean Assyrians of urban Mosul and its environs react to the devastation of the independent Assyrian tribal regions, as it occurred?
Aboona’s book is an engaging first look at the tribal politics and ethnocultural and interreligious conflict and cooperation in northern Mesopotamia and southeastern Anatolia during the late Ottoman period. He has begun to carve out a niche for Assyrian studies within the field of modern Middle Eastern studies that specifically deals with this understudied indigenous people, laying the groundwork for future research.
Hannibal Travis
Visiting Associate Professor of Law
Villanova University School of Law
Sargon George Donabed
Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies
Stonehill College