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The anatomy of erasure: Indigenous Assyrian women and forgotten genocide

August 5, 2026

The author, an Assyrian from West Asia, recounts learning about the systematic persecution of their Indigenous people, beginning with the 1933 Simele massacre in Iraq where thousands of Assyrians were killed in an ethnic cleansing campaign that has never been officially acknowledged. Assyrians, who speak Neo-Aramaic and trace ancestry to ancient civilizations across parts of Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, faced genocide in 1915 that eliminated approximately 75 percent of their population, yet they receive no constitutional recognition as Indigenous people in any Middle Eastern nation. The piece emphasizes how sexual violence against Assyrian women and girls has been used as a tool of cultural destruction across generations, from historical genocides through ISIS attacks, yet their experiences remain largely absent from academic records and international advocacy efforts.

Who is affected

  • Assyrians, an Indigenous ethnic group from West Asia (Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq)
  • Assyrian women and girls who have experienced abduction, rape, forced conversions, and forced marriages
  • Survivors of the 1933 Simele massacre
  • Survivors of the 1915 Ottoman-led genocide (Sayfo)
  • Assyrian communities targeted by ISIS through killings, displacement, and enslavement
  • Families separated from Assyrian women and girls who were taken or disappeared
  • Children born of rape who inherit perpetrators' religious identity under West Asian legal frameworks
  • The author's great-great-aunt Sorayya, a survivor of Seyfo
  • Descendants who only discovered their Assyrian maternal heritage as adults

What action is being taken

  • Organizations such as Seyfo Centre, Assyrian Studies Association, and Assyrian Genocide Studies are addressing historiographical gaps and archiving women's accounts
  • These preservation efforts are sustained mainly through volunteer goodwill within the Assyrian community
  • Yazidi people are receiving international advocacy for crimes committed by ISIS against their women and girls

Why it matters

  • This matters because Assyrians face potential disappearance from their ancestral homelands despite a presence stretching across millennia, representing the erasure of an Indigenous people through systematic violence and forced assimilation. The specific targeting of women and girls through sexual violence serves as an instrument of genocide by destroying social existence, fracturing family structures, and eliminating the custodians of cultural continuity who preserve language, traditions, and folklore across generations. The archival silence surrounding Assyrian women's experiences compounds their victimization, effectively erasing their suffering from history and preventing accountability, while their categorization merely as "Christians" rather than as a distinct ethnic group obscures the gendered and ethnic-specific nature of their persecution. Current minority status demands interrogation into why an Indigenous majority population could face near-extinction within a century, and the loss of older generations means opportunities to preserve first-hand memories are rapidly disappearing.

What's next

  • No explicit next steps stated in the article

Read full article from source: Global Voices