Hakkari

In the 19th century, several competing Kurdish centers began emerging in the region. Mir Muhammed, the Kurdish Emir of the Soran Emirate, situated around Rawanduz was able to depose his rivals and control a region stretching from Mardin to Persian Azerbaijan.[7] He was however defeated in battle when he tried to subdue the Assyrians of Hakkari in 1838. The Ottomans, seeking to consolidate their control of the region, engaged him in a costly war which eventually led to the dissolution of his Emirate.[8]

After the fall of his main rival Badr Khan of Bohtan sought to extend his dominion by annexing the Assyrian regions in Hakkari.[9] He took advantage of a rift between the patriarch Shimun XVII Abraham and Nur Allah, the Emir of Hakkari. Badr Khan allied with Nur Allah and attacked the Assyrians of Hakkari in the summer of 1843 massacring them and taking those who survived as slaves.[10] Another massacre was inflicted in 1846 on the Assyrians of Tiyari, also residing in Hakkari.[10] The western powers, alarmed by the massacres pressured the Ottomans to intervene. Badr Khan was subsequently defeated and exiled to Crete in 1847.[10]

The checkered Christian districts southeast of Lake Van is where the Assyrians of Hakkari lived, while the Christian districts in Blue designate where Armenians lived

Although the region was nominally under Ottoman control since the 16th century, it was in reality administered by its Assyrian and Kurdish inhabitants and their lords. The situation changed after the Badr Khans rule and the Tanzimat reforms as the Ottomans now were able to extend their full control unopposed, and in 1868 the Sanjak of Hakkari was created.[11]

On the eve of the First World War, patriarch Shimun XIX Benyamin was promised preferential treatment in anticipation of the war.[12] Shortly after the war began, however, Assyrian and Armenian settlements to the north of Hakkari were attacked and sacked by Kurdish irregulars allied with the Ottoman Army in the Assyrian Genocide.[13][14] Others were forced into labour battalions and later executed.[15]

The turning point was when the patriarch's brother was taken prisoner as he was studying in Constantinople. The Ottomans demanded Assyrian neutrality and executed him as a warning.[16][17] In return, the patriarch declared war on the Ottomans on 10 April 1915.[16]

The Assyrians were immediately attacked by Kurdish irregulars backed by the Ottomans, driving most of the Assyrians of Hakkari to the mountain tops, as those who stayed in their villages were killed.[16] Shimun Benjamin was able to move unnoticed to Urmia, which at the time was under Russian control, and tried to persuade them to send a relief force to the besieged Assyrians.[16] When the Russians replied that the request was unreasonable, he returned to Hakkari and led the surviving 50,000 Assyrians through the mountains to safety in Urmia.[16] Thousands perished from cold and hunger during this march.[16]

During the peace conferences in Paris in 1919, the Assyrians asked for a state in Diyarbekir and northern Mesopotamia in Iraq; others requested a British protectorate in Upper Mesopotamia, northern Mosul, and Urmia.[18] The Assyrians tried to retake the region, but the Turks and Kurds objected to the Nestorian Christians desire to retake their ancestral lands in Hakkari, and an attempt to occupy the region by Agha Petros failed. In 1924 Turkey formally occupied northern Hakkari and expelled the last Christian inhabitants who still remained in the region,[19] with the exception of the village of Gaznakh which due to Kurdish alliances and their conversion to the Chaldean Catholic Church avoided deportation. Assyrians still live in the southern Hakkari region of Barwari Bala, now straddling fhe Turkey-Iraq border, and in the Sapna and Nahla Valleys of Iraqs Nohadra region.