The initial destruction of the Iraqi Assyrian village of Simele, sometimes referred to as the Simele ‘Massacre’ or ‘Incident’ and the looting and razing of numerous villages of the region in August of 1933, was one of the two events in the living memory of a young Raphael Lemkin which influenced his presentation to the League of Nations in 1933 in Madrid, arguing the issue as a crime according to international law. Due to the contentious nature of his argument within the existing international legal framework, Lemkin was forced to resign from his post in 1934 by the Polish foreign minister. Yet, despite the notoriety of this issue and its discussion by the British and League of Nations committees immediately following the incident, it has rarely met with inquiry by modern scholarship on Iraq nation-building. This paper serves to shed light on a key questions concerning Iraq, colonialism, and early state building. First, was the event as a result of British fears of losing power—and control of resources in the region that permitted the massacres to occur and assured their exclusion from any serious international investigation and response? Was the Simele incident carried out under a war paradigm because Britain feared for her oil in Mosul? Furthermore, would this event pave the way for the Iraqi regime’s future policies affecting Assyrians and other minorities by simply following the colonial model for power consolidation? Lastly, was the event a catalyst for enabling a new Iraq to solidify its homogeneity as a nation? This study is an attempt to reinsert this event into the history of the Iraqi state as part and parcel of the nation-building process. The event remains a fundamental act of the newly created Iraqi polity in its successive treatment of minority communities. It will also attempt to discern its affected on the Assyrians in both their inter and intra-communal development. Much of the research is drawn from US and British archival research as well as previous unexplored Assyrian oral accounts and narratives of the event in their native Aramaic language, including eyewitness accounts and previously unrecorded survivor interviews.