The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> The Nestorians Fight...for what?

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Monday, April 9 2007, 23:24:10 (CEST)
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Having suffered repeatedly at the hands of Russian Christian soldiers, the Muslims declared a holy war against them in 1916. This intensified bitter feelings against the Nestorians as well. The Ottoman government had tried in vain to enlist the loyalty of Mar Shimmun…members of his family who counseled such a move were killed in cold blood by their own kinsmen.

Later these Hakkari Nestorians would be forced to flee, winding up in what was to become northern Iraq where, at the end of the war, they continued insisting on British guarantees, special treatment and the right to return to their tribal lands. When none of this materialized they were encouraged by the British to quietly infiltrate their homelands under the leadership of Agha Poutrous, a plan which ended in disaster…they then waded into Syria in search of French guarantees, this time, only to return, fighting the Iraqi army. At that point the Iraqi government had enough…it was felt that these Hakkari Nestorians, who were not indigenous to Iraq but had been allowed to resettle for their own safety, were a nuisance and ungrateful to boot. If they had been forced to flee their homelands it was only because they had taken up arms, at the behest of the Russians, against their neighbors. Iraq felt it owed them nothing.

The British as well found use for them, until the war ended. Indeed it was on a mission to get arms and ammunition from the British that rumors spread about the total destruction of Agha Poutrous and his small army which emboldened the Muslims to attack the villages in Urmia…causing the tragic exodus of the families left behind...who also wound up in Iraq with their Hakkari kin.

One wonders what the Nestorians were thinking when some of them agreed to fight for the Russians first and then the British…if they didn’t see in this move a future tragedy awaiting them when the war was over. It isn’t as if they were fighting “for” something…something tangible. They certainly weren’t engaged in battles whose direct outcome, if victorious, would be the seizure of their own lands back with any chance at security. Their small numbers would make that impossible…either to achieve or hold on to.

Rather it seems they were fighting to “fight”…that is to harass the Turks and thereby keep their soldiers from joining the war in Palestine…it was the British who led the way by sending Major Dunsterville among them to arm and train what amounted to a “nuisance” force, a diversion…nothing more glorious. There was certainly nothing to be gained, except to relieve the pressure on the British. They would earn nothing themselves by taking such a tremendous risk, risking their families as well and leaving everything up to the good graces of the British, should they choose to “do anything” for them out of gratitude.

In the end they lost it all…not just for themselves but for all the Nestorians of Hakkari…and further, when they took up arms inside of Iraq to force the issue and “get what was owed them”, they made things infinitely worse, again, not just for the Hakkari contingent but for all the Nestorians who’d escaped from Urmia as well… whose only future lay, as it did for all of them, in learning how to get along and not fight against their new neighbors and country.

That pattern is repeating itself today…as we sit here and write. Once again it is a small handful who are ruining it for all the rest…a handful whose middle finger is Fred Aprim.

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