The massacre of members of Iraq’s Assyrian refugee community in 1933 remains one of the most controversial moments in the early history of independent Iraq. It has become an all too common practice of scholars and pundits alike to reach back into earlier moments in Iraqi history to find the roots of sectarianism, even an inherent predisposition of Iraqis toward communalism and mass atrocity. Alongside the “Farhud,” the “Assyrian Tragedy” is one of the events highlighted in this historical genealogy. Linking the “Tragedy” to current events, beyond just being a simple problem of anachronism, also obscures the larger significance of this moment to understanding important transformations in both Iraqi society, as well as the role of international humanitarianism in a neocolonial environment. What is likewise obscured by a presentist focus on the “Tragedy” is that it tends to render one-dimensional the Assyrian refugee presence in Iraq, underscoring their role as agents of British imperial rule, rather than exploring the larger significance of the nature of the refugee in interwar Iraq, what their status can tell us about question of the citizen and the state in the post-Ottoman Arab Middle East, and the tension between a post-colonial country and colonialist-dominated, though humanitarian-oriented League of Nations. This paper analyzes a key element at the interface of humanitarianism and the massacres, namely the way the League of Nations came to consider the continuing presence of refugee Assyrians in Iraq as subject to a permanent and essential sectarianism ¬– understood as both an ethnic and religious form of difference. The League’s view – which built from similar moments, including the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey and the resettlement of Armenian refugees — engender again a policy of transfer as the preferred “solution” to what it considered implacable sectarianism. Welcomed by many sides of the conflict, the League’s actions reinforced the authority of sectarian elites against emerging forms of citizenship and national belonging – weakening both in the process. The Assyrian case, while perhaps the most bloody, was not especially unique in the Arab Levant, where the movement of displaced peoples created the extraordinarily difficult problem of how to fit “outsiders” into new national constructs, while at the same time fulfilling explicit and implicit requirements of an emerging international humanitarian régime