In 1933, one year after Iraq gained its independence, the Iraqi army massacred Christian Assyrians at the village of Simele. Accounts of this tragedy have problematically anchored it in Iraq’s allegedly inherent sectarian tendencies, framing it as a hegemonic Muslim ‘majority’ against an oppressed ‘minority’ – a narrative prevalent in the Orientalist approach towards the Middle East. Instead, I reframe the Simele massacre within the modern nation state-building processes by analyzing the developments leading up to this tragedy. Through this framework, I posit that the structure, mobilizing efforts, and forms of resistance of a specific group of Assyrians (the Mar Sham’un Party), adhere to the paradigm of nationalism and nationalist movements. To gain concessions from the government, the party employed forms of contentious politics, such as engaging in active propaganda, undertaking a policy of non-cooperation, and influencing dissident actions of the Levies (British-led military consisting of Assyrian men) against the local population. The party utilized a nationalist framing to recruit members, and laboured efforts to consolidate the Assyrian identity through claims of indigeneity, using this rhetoric to demand secession from the nascent Iraqi state. The party’s ideology and activities, however, stood in direct opposition to Iraq’s state-building process, prompting a swift reaction by the Iraqi military. By recasting the massacre in a modern state-building paradigm, we find that Iraq’s response of violence and repression was not exclusive to the Assyrians. Rather, it was a typical reaction to any movement rooted in political opposition. This is mirrored in the Iraqi military’s ruthless suppression of Arab tribal rebellions and Kurdish movements during the same time-period of the Simele massacre, which suggests that the narratives of sectarianism and majority/minority antagonisms are misleading. My analysis is based on the models developed by nationalism theorists, including Anthony D. Smith, Ernest Gellner, and Benedict Anderson. On Iraq and the Assyrians, I employ government documents from the National Archives of the United Kingdom and the League of Nations Archives, as well as Assyrian nationalist journal publications, and sources written by contemporary figures. This research will therefore serve to deconstruct the reductive narrative available on the Simele massacre and will reframe the Assyrians as active actors in Iraq’s history rather than as passive agents. It will furthermore shift the occurrence from being written exclusively under Genocide Studies genre and will insert it into Iraq’s political history, reconciling the political dissidence leading up to the massacre with modernity and state-building processes.