Assyrian Identity and the Great War

Assyrian Identity and the Great War: Nestorian, Chaldean, and Syrian Christians in the 20th Century by Bül̈ent Özdemir, 168 pages

In addition to the better-known campaign of genocide carried out against the Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during World War I, other Christian minorities in Ottoman territory also suffered greatly in what is sometimes called the Sayfo, or Assyrian genocide.  Bül̈ent Özdemir's work attempts to establish, without denying that many members of various ethnic and religious groups suffered greatly during the War, that the Sayfo as such never actually happened, but was the invention of post-war Assyrian nationalists.

The book is a muddled mess.  At the outset, Özdemir paints an overly rosy portrait of religious tranquility under the Ottomans, which is only disturbed when foreign missionaries arrive to stir up trouble.  Towards the end, he spends a considerable amount of space accusing the British of betraying the Assyrians, who had been their allies during the War, in a transparent attempt to deflect criticism away from the Turks.  In between, there is the story of a poorly defined religious minority revolting for reasons that are not entirely clear and being decimated by violence, hunger, and disease as a result.  I opened this book hoping to learn more about the ancient Christian communities of the Near East, but, sadly, this book failed to fulfill those hopes.