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.

Genocide and area studies scholars increasingly tend to describe what used to be known solely as "The Armenian Genocide" as, instead, an Ottoman Christian genocide. Yet authors writing in the "Armenian Genocide" tradition frequently argue that the genocide happened in 1915 and claimed from one to 1.5 million Armenians. Beginning the story in 1915 suppresses what happened to the Assyrians and Greeks in 1914 or from 1916 to 1923, both temporally and statistically. The Turkish state and its supporters in academia attempt to tell a similar story of a sudden crisis in 1915 involving Armenians only, and a separate one for Greeks only starting in 1920, so as to blame the Armenian rebellion at Van and the Greek occupation of the Smyrna region for civilian deaths during the war. Thus, the two apparently warring sides in "The Armenian Genocide Debate" make common cause in ignoring the Assyrians and Greeks. Scholars of the Armenian genocide often state that there were two million Armenians in 1914, and virtually none remaining in Turkey by 1923. They often neglect to state, however, that there were about two million Greeks and 500,000 Assyrians in 1914, and only about 250,000 Christians of all kinds in Turkey in 1927, even though that country included northern Assyria and Pontic Greece. There were nearly as many Jews as Greek Orthodox Christians in 1927, even though there were only about a tenth as many Jews as Greeks in 1914. The number of non-Greek Christians declined by another 40% by 1935, and Assyrians were dropped from the 1935 census in order to prevent the League of Nations from recognizing an Assyrian problem, as it had done. The Greek population fell to a few thousand and the Assyrian population to under 3,000 by the 1990s. This paper analyzes the key developments in scholarship on the Armenian Genocide from the signing of the Genocide Convention to the present, and describes recent findings that the existing scholarship has ignored, seemingly on purpose, the destruction of the Ottoman Assyrians and Greeks from 1914 through the 1930s. Its methodology consists in collecting the most-cited books and articles on the Armenian genocide, retrieving the sources cited in them, and searching for evidence in these sources that Assyrians and Greeks suffered from some of the same events, perpetrators, and effects from 1914 to 1940.