By: George Stifo

Courtesy: Assyrian Star, Spring 2004/ 6754. Volume LVI, Number I.

The year 1915 (Sayfo) and the massacres of Assyrians in Iran and Turkey (Tur Abdin and Hakkare) are painful remembrances that we share. Histories of other massacres too by Kurdish tribal leaders like Bader Khan in 1843-46 committed in Hakkare and by Mehmet Pasha (the infamous Amir Koy) of Rawandoz in 1832-1836 are becoming better known as we open our eyes to the cruelties that have driven us to fear an loath the tribal barbarism from which our people still suffer. Many have relatives whose spirits were stunted by the massacres of 1895-96 in Turkey that drove Assyrians like Senharib Bally into America refuge But there are smaller incidents in between, vivid to those who still remember them, that occurred not in Iran, not in Turkey, but in Syria. As the current events in northeast Syria unfold, we need to keep these in mind lest we grow soft and careless.

For millennias, Assyrians have been living in their ancestral homeland falling in portions of today's Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. As we focus our village article on an Assyrian village that falls in Syria, let us recall this gruesome episode that was a precursor to the major Sayfo born of evil of envy, the factor that lies behind much of the persecution that we have suffered at the hands of some of the most backward people in the Middle East.

The village in question lay within Ottoman rule, before the carving out of Syria, Iraq, and other countries. The village we will focus on is Helwa (or Helwe as the name appears in an 1870 Syriac manuscript). Helwa means beautiful and it was so when Assyrian inhabited the village.

Helwa lies within the Jazira region, in northeast Syria, approximately 20 km east of Qamishly and 10 km from Tel-Lailan archeological site. Tel-Leilan has been discovered to be the ancient Assyrian capital of Shabat-Inlil build for Kind Shamshi-Adad I (1813-1781 BC), thus putting Helwa well within distance of Assyrian Sites. Close by Helwa is located Mor Malke Monastery and the village of Arkah (Kharabale) both today just across the border in Turkey. Helwa's agricultural lands were high quality due, in part to the proximity of Soplakh (Supalakh), a river whose name means 'the clean, sparkling water'. These waters no longer flow. The tress of Helwa are gone, as are its fields of grain. In 1870, the Jacobite monk Abdallah (Avoud Alah) Sattouf Al-Sadadi (from Sadad, Syria) visited Helwa and jotted down information about the inhabitants, all Jacobites like him. There are about forty families. One of the famous persons with origins in Helwa was the late Archbishop Mor Athnasius Yeshu' Samuel (1907-1995), who was the Jabobite Archbishop of the United States and Canada for almost 50 years. Archbishop Samuel was involved in the discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Other prominent Assyrian families of Helwa are the Beda (Bede), Malke, Suhdo, Dashte and Muqsi* Haydo (*Muqsi is short for Maqdusi or a Christian who has made pilgrimage to Jerusalem at Easter). The Village's Mukhtar was Eliyo Beda (Bede).

In the early 1900s, the people of the village, feeling pity for the starving Kurdish shepherds in the area, helped them by offering them work on the farms and with the village herds. This kindness soon proved a terrible mistake. This would not be the first time that this caring attitude of Assyrians towards others ended up backfiring at them.

In 1911, the Kurds in nearby Nisibin had conspired to kill the Christian Assyrians. This action infected other Muslims in the area led by the Mhallami (Mhalmoyo) chieftain Qaddour Beg. Mhallamiyee (pl.) are Assyrians who converted to Islam a few centuries ago. (Somewhat like the Hemshin Armenians who converted to Islam). Qaddour Beg colluded with the Kurdish rebels, and, told them of his scheme to rid the area of its indigenous Christian Assyrian inhabitants in the name of Islam. The Kurds promised him loyalty, as they would be rewarded with the lands, the women and anything else belonging to the Assyrian Christians.

Following the massacres in Nisibin, the Kurds attacked Helwa using information provided by the Kurds whom the Assyrians had employed. Together with Kurds of other villages stirred by Gaddour Beg, they surrounded the village blocking any escape for the inhabitants. Some Assyrians did escape to flee Helwa, but the majority could not. The Kurds rounded up the men, tied them together and marched them up to a hill called Qayro that overlooked the Soplakh.

The Assyrians were given the option of converting to Islam or being killed. A few accepted, and survived, but the majority refused, were shot, and their bodies rolled down the hill and into the river. Killing at river banks, a practice made familiar from the Genocide of 1915, saving the Kurds the bother of burying the Christian corpses which Muslims consider ritually unclean. On the other hand, leaving bodies to rot near their newly acquired village would be unpleasant. Hence the automated river burial, as an alternative to having the victims digs their graves.

The Helwa women were gathered in one of the village yards while the Kurdish men chose the once they wanted. Those, the Kurds saw undesirable for sex, they forced into Islam and took as servants. Children under 10 years-old were considered pliant enough to force into conversation. The older ones, elderly women or those who resisted were tied together and set on fire in the middle of the village for all to see. Fire, like river burial, dose not entail burial. The widespread use of fire later during the "year of the Sword" caused many to call the ethnic cleansing a holocaust, especially before the coining of the term Genocide in 1943.

While the Assyrians were burning, a Helwa woman named Zouza, was saved by a Kurdish woman from the village who made her a second wife for her husband. She had two sons from the Kurdish man, but all the while refused to convert to Islam. Her sons are still living in the village today, but their names must remain anonymous for their safety. When even on her deathbed Zouza refused to accept the entreaties of a Muslim cleric to accept Islam as her faith, upon her death the cleric ordered the villagers not to bury because she was an infidel and must be treated as such. Her body was thrown in a field and left unburied until an Assyrian man named 'Gallo' from neighboring village took her body to his own village where Zouza was buried finally in the Assyrian cemetery.

After the massacr Kurds choose a new Mukhtar for their newly confiscated village. They chose a man named Ali Al-Isa, who was one of the starving shepherds that the Assyrians had pitied. Despite the kindness shown to him and other Kurds, he was one of the people who assisted in the killing of the Assyrians. Late in life, even his conscious bothered him.

Accourding to Muslim eyewitnesses, Ali went to Muslim Clerics and told them
that while the Assyrians were burning, he heard a baby's cry, and he took him and threw him into the fire and watched him burn to death. He asked the Clerics what he might do to penance. Their response was that he must visit Mecca twice to be forgiven.

To this very day, the Kurds of Helwa call the location of where they killed the Assyrians of Helwa Gola Khoyne Fella (The Pond of Christian Blood). There is no pond or river in the area anymore, but according to local Kurds and Assyrians, due to the great number of Assyrians killed, a large puddle of blood had accumulated in the village.

On the hill of Qayro where the Helwa Assyrians were killed, the Kurds had also gathered Assyrian from Douger, a nearby village. Among them was the village priest, Qasho Malke who died before reaching the hill due to the severe beating the Kurds had administered. Qasho Malke is the grandfather of Fr. George Malke, currently in Sweden. With Qasho Malke, the Kurds had also tied up his two sons, Issa and Mousa intending to kill them on the hill. They were shot and their bodies rolled down the hill. They did not die but hid at the bottom of the hill in the river, in order to survive and tell the world what they saw and what happened to the Assyrians of Douger and Helwa.

Archbishop Samuel, at the time of the massacre was 4 years-old and, according to the elderly Assyrian eyewitnesses, in order for his mother, Khatoun, to keep him and herself alive, she accepted marrying a Kurd. His father did not survive and was one of the Assyrian martyrs of Helwa, to save her son from being Kurdified and converted to Islam, Khatoun pleaded with some Assyrians to help her child Isho'. The child was smuggled out by Assyrians and taken to Arkah (Kharable) and he stayed in the Assyrian Monasteries of Tur Abdin for two years in care of the monks.

Khatoun remained married to the Kurd for those two years, and then with the help of Yezidis in the area, and Gallo and his family (the same Gallo who buried Zouza), she was reunited with her son and spirited into the Sinjar Mountains in Iraq and from there to Mosul, where they stayed at the Mar Mattay Monastery. At eight Isho' Samuel was taken to Adana to the Assyrian Orphanage School, which had been created in 1909 by the Assyrian Orphanage and School Association (Taw Meem Simkat) to meet the needs of the many orphans whose families perished in similar massacres. Once he completed his basic education in 1921, he went to Beirut and Jerusalem to continue his theological studies. In 1946, he was appointed the Archbishop of Jerusalem and in 1948 he moved to New Jersey to take up an appointment as the Archbishop of the Assyrian Orthodox Church for the United States and Canada. He was the first Archbishop to hold this position.

Meanwhile in Helwa, after two years of unsuccessful attempts to farm the vary arable village farmland that they had coveted, the Kurds were facing problems. As poor shepherd for many generations, they knew nothing about farming. They began to negotiate the return of the surviving Assyrian inhabitants of the village. A small number accepted and took charge of their old lands, working for the Kurds. The Assyrian men who returned to Helwa along with their families were Gallo Ba'do, Hanna Hamra, Hanna Lahdino, and the Beth Hido family, but few years later, due to harassment from Kurds in the area, it became vary hard for Assyrians to remain in the village and they left for Qamishly and Qabre Hewore or immigrated to Europe.

The Helwa story is similar to that of hundreds of other Assyrian villages from Diyarbakir to Lake Uremia. Today the village of Helwa is completely Kurdified and no Assyrians reside there. Even those Assyrians of the village who were converted to Islam during the Genocide avoid reference to their Christian and Assyrian origins for fear of being killed. The vast number of trees the village was known for and the river that used to flow through the lands of the village,
have both dried up. The lands are also not as giving as the used to be. The Assyrian name and presence may have vanished completely from Helwa, but not from its history. Not as long as we remember.