The Forgotten Sword: A Deep Dive into the Sayfo

0:00Whether it's slots or live dealers, SpinQuest.com has the fun and action you're looking for, with SpinQuest exclusives, Blackjack, Roulette, Fakera, and even live dice with craps and bubble craps. The games never stop, so you don't have to. And right now, new users get $30 coin packs for just $10 bucks. Play now at SpinQuest.com. SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino. Point where prohibited, visit SpinQuest.com for more details. Welcome, everyone. And especially a massive welcome to you, our listener, for joining us today on another custom tailored deep dive. We've got a, well, a pretty heavy stack of source material in front of us today. We really do. It's meticulously detailed. Lots of historical archives, demographic records, geopolitical data. Yeah, and we're going to use all of that to extract the most critical insights from a deeply complex, incredibly dark, and honestly, often overlooked period of early 20th century history. Right. The paramount piece of global history.

1:02We are focusing our lens on the shifting, volatile geopolitical forces during the First World War, specifically the era from 1914 to roughly 1924. Which violently redrew the map of the Middle East. Yeah. And an unimaginable human cost. Absolutely. So our specific topic today is the safe foe, or seafo. And just for context, that is a neo-Aromatic word that translates literally to sword. But since the 10th century, it's carried a much heavier cultural weight. Right. Taking on the meaning of extermination or extinction. And today, that term refers specifically to the mass murder and deportation of the Syrian and Syria Christians in the Ottoman Empire and Persia during World War I. Our mission for this deep dive is to really untangle the incredibly complicated routes of this history. We want to understand the overarching imperial ambitions that led to it. The big picture stuff. Exactly. But also examine the highly localized nature of the violence on the ground. And we want to explore a profound historical paradox.

2:02Why this massive event, which completely decimated an ancient population, remains so much less known globally than the concurrent Armenian genocide. Yeah. That's a huge question we'll get into. Before we step into 1914, a quick note for you as we dive into this material. An important note. Very. The historical records here, especially regarding the international recognition and the subsequent denial of these events, are deeply politically charged. Very heavily debated today. Right. So our mission today is not to take sides. We aren't endorsing any specific political viewpoint here. We are strictly and impartially serving as your guides through the source material. We're just laying out the historical accounts, the international law being efforts, and the modern day Turkish government's official denials exactly as they are documented in the provided text. Exactly. Our goal is simply to convey the ideas, facts, and conflicting narratives contained in that original material. Nothing more. Our role is to examine the provided information objectively, helping you understand both what happened on the ground,

3:03and how the legacy of those events is fiercely contested a century later. Okay, let's unpack this because to really understand the CIFO, we can't just look at the dates of World War I. We have to start by setting the physical and cultural scene. We have to go to the mountains. Yes, I want you to imagine living in the Haqari mountains. These aren't just rolling picture-esque hills we're talking about. We are from it. We are talking about jagged, imposing peaks reaching up to 13,000 feet into the sky, separated by incredibly steep, treacherous gorges. In many of these areas, there are absolutely no roads. Right, the only way in or out is by navigating narrow footpaths literally carved into the sheer size of the mountains. It is an extreme, almost unfathomable level of remote isolation. If we connect this to the bigger picture, that mountainous tapestry shaped the very identity of the people living there. Also. Well, to understand why that matters, we have to look at how the Ottoman Empire was structured administratively at the time.

4:07The Empire didn't organize its populations by ethnicity. Right, it was by religion. Exactly. They organized them by religion. This framework was known as the millet system. So an Ottoman official isn't looking at these Highlanders and categorizing them as ethnic Assyrians. Far from it. The source actually notes that even speaking of an Assyrian genocide during the specific time period is a bit anachronistic. Because they didn't see themselves that way yet. Right. The Assyrians weren't a unified cohesive nation. They were divided into different and frequently mutually antagonistic religious denominations. You had this Syriac Orthodox Church. The Assyrian Church of the East. The Chaldean Catholic Church. Exactly. When asked who they were, the primary loyalty and identity lay with their specific church, not a broader ethnic umbrella. And because they lived in these incredibly remote, high-altitude regions of Hikari, they were effectively stateless for generations. I mean, they settled in those mountains specifically to avoid the reach of imperial state control. Which ended up being a massive double-edged sword.

5:09Yeah. On one hand, living up in the clouds helped them avoid paying taxes to the Ottoman Empire. Right. And it kept their young men from being conscripted into the imperial army. But the flip side is tragic. It cemented their internal differences. Right. It completely prevented them from forming a unified national identity or a cohesive political movement. Which is a stark contrast to the Armenian national movement that was rapidly developing at the exact same time. And then you add the shifting dynamics of the 19th and early 20th centuries to that mix. Right. The Ottoman Empire was desperately trying to modernize, to centralize its power. The state wanted to assert control over these historically stateless, rebellious mountain regions. And compounding this pressure was a massive demographic shift. After the Ottoman Empire lost significant territory in the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913, a huge influx of Muslim refugees poured into eastern Anatolia. And the government had to put them somewhere. Exactly. They decided to resettle these refugees on land confiscated from populations they deemed disloyal or problematic.

6:10So you take an incredibly isolated fractured region. You introduce centralizing state troops. And you flood the area with displaced refugees competing for scarce land and resources. It turned the entire mountainous region into a powder keg of tension. Which brings us right to the brink of World War I. The geopolitical chess match is in full swing. The Ottomans and the Russians are preparing for a massive clash. And they are both actively courting the populations living behind each other's lines. Hoping to spark guerrilla warfare, internal sabotage. It was an impossibly dangerous position for the Assyrians. The Russians are looking across the border at the Armenians, Kurds, and Assyrians living within the Ottoman Empire trying to secure their support. Meanwhile, the Ottomans are doing the exact same thing in reverse. Right. Trying to enlist Caucasian Muslims, Armenians, and Assyrians living in Persian territory. So the Assyrians just find themselves caught directly in the crossfire of two massive paranoid empires preparing for total war. Total war. The war kicks off and the paranoia reaches a boiling point.

7:11But what is the actual spark? What turns this from simmering geopolitical tension into active state-sanction deportation? The directive comes from the very top of the Ottoman government, specifically from the Committee of Union and Progress, or the CUP. The ultra-nationalist ruling party at the time. Yes. On October 26, 1914, just before the Ottoman Empire officially entered the war, the Ottoman Interior Minister Talat Pasha sent a telegram to the governor of Venn province. And this telegram is key. It is. In this dispatched, Talat actively doubts the loyalty of the Hakari Assyrians and explicitly orders their deportation. And the specific parameters of that deportation order are just staggering. What's fascinating and horrifying here is the calculated bureaucratic nature of that order. The directive stated that the Assyrians were to be resettled among Muslims further west. But it included a strict condition. A non-negotiable condition. No more than 20 Assyrians could reside in any one place.

8:11Let's just pause and think about that. 20 people. That is barely if you extended families. How does a community, let alone an ancient culture, survive being atomized like that? It doesn't. And that was the entire point. Yeah. When you cap a forced resettlement at 20 people, you aren't just moving a population for military security. You are executing a deliberate administrative strategy to completely destroy their culture, their language, and their traditional way of life. By scattering them so thinly across the empire, they could never maintain their community structures. Or the religious practices. Exactly. The source material notes that historian David Gaunt cites this specific telegram and its rule of 20 as the definitive beginning of the SAFO. From there, the sheer scale of the conflict that follows is horrific. Initially, local Ottoman forces, Kurdish volunteers, and irregular militias couldn't mount successful attacks on the heavily armed Highland Assyrian tribes. The terrain was just too tough. The tribes were too well defended up there.

9:12So the forces targeted the poorly armed, vulnerable Christian villages down in the plains. Entire lowland populations were massacred or forced to flee into neighboring Persia. But the Highlanders up in the peaks didn't just sit and wait for the army to arrive. No, they took unprecedented action. In May 1915, the disparate Assyrian Highland tribes actually held a meeting and declared war. They announced a general mobilization against the Ottoman Empire. They attempted a coordinated military defense, even sending their women and children to the highest most inaccessible mountain areas to protect them while the men fought below. But determination only goes so far against an imperial army. Despite achieving some victorious battles in the rugged terrain, they were ultimately outnumbered, cut off from supplies, and completely outgunned by Ottoman forces who were equipped with heavy German manufactured artillery and modern machine guns. By September 1915, the Highland tribes realized the defense was broken. They had no choice but to abandon their ancestral homes,

10:13fighting their way out to escape into Persia, watching their villages and farms burn behind them. So the violence pushes outward. It's no longer contained in just the Haqqari mountains. The geographic spread is vast, and the source material details some incredibly grim, localized events as the violence sweeps into Persia, Bittles, and Diarbacare. This is a crucial aspect of the SAFO. We see the violence take on a highly localized character. Because while the broad overarching directives for deportation and homogenization came from the CUP Central government in Constantinople, local actors frequently took matters into their own hands. The central government created the permissive environment, but local governors, police chiefs, and tribal leaders frequently dictated the ultimate severity and brutality of the violence on the ground. Let's trace that into Persia, specifically the Azerbaijan province. Russia had true station there early in the war, and they had even armed some of the local Assyrians to act as a buffer. But on January 1, 1915, the Russian forces abruptly and unexpectedly withdrew from the region.

11:17Leaving the Christian populations completely exposed to advancing forces. Ottoman troops occupied the region without any major opposition, and almost immediately local Muslim populations and Ottoman troops began committing massive pogroms. One of the most brutal, systematic incidents occurred at Haftivan. Yes, Ottoman forces lured the local Christians there, under the guise of telling them they needed to register with the new authorities. And once they gathered. Over the course of two days in February, 700 to 800 people, essentially the entire male Christian population of the area, were executed by the Ottoman army and the local Shukat Kurdish tribe. It's an absolute nightmare scenario. The violence even breached the walls of international missionary compounds in Armenia. Places where thousands of desperate Christians had sought shelter, believing they would be safe under foreign flags. At the Lazarist compound, Ottoman forces forced their way in. More than 100 men were arrested, and dozens were executed, including a prominent bishop. Moving westward into the bitless province,

12:18the nature of the violence becomes even more militarized. We see the arrival of Jeved Ed Bay. An Ottoman official who led a formidable 8,000 man force. He literally referred to his own troops as the Butcher battalion. Just a chilling name. And the arrival of that battalion in the Cirque district was completely devastating. Cirque was a major historic Christian enclave, largely populated by Geldeen Catholics. At Amika Insurance, we know it's not just what's inside your home that matters. It's who you share it with. That's why we work even harder to protect it. And as a mutual insurance company, we're built for our customers. We prioritize your needs and are here for you when you need us. Amika, empathy is our best policy. Visit amika.com and get a quote today. Whether it's slots or live dealers, SpinQuest.com has the fun and action you're looking for.

13:19With SpinQuest exclusives, Blackjack, Roulette, Bacara, and even live dice with craps and bubble craps. The games never stop so you don't have to. And right now, new users get $30 coin packs for just $10 bucks. Play now at SpinQuest.com. SpinQuest is a free to play social casino. Boydware prohibited. Visit SpinQuest.com for more details. Month-long massacre orchestrated by local officials there, Christians were killed in the streets, and Chaudy and diocese of CERT was completely destroyed. And crucially, that destruction included their vast library of rare ancient manuscripts. Think about the weight of that for a second. We are talking about the profound loss of human life, which is always the paramount tragedy, but alongside it is the systematic erasure of centuries, of recorded culture, theology, and history. They were burning the memory of the people. The survivors in CERT, who were mostly women and children, because the men had been executed, were then forced on brutal death marches.

14:21Driven south through harsh terrain, like the Wadiwawila gorge. They were stripped of their possessions, often their clothes, and anyone who fell behind out of exhaustion or starvation was killed. Out of an estimated 7 to 8,000 Chaudyans from that specific area, maybe 50 to 100 actually survived the agonizing march to Mosul. The localized, almost autonomous brutality of the Seifo becomes even more apparent when we examine the Dyerback province. Here we encounter an Ottoman governor named Mehmed Rashid. Who essentially went rogue? Completely rogue. He was specifically chosen for his post because of his prior record of ruthless violence, and he brought his own dedicated team of operatives with him to the province. He instituted a massive systematic extermination campaign against all Christians in his jurisdiction. What makes Dyerbackir a unique case study for historians is the surviving administrative trail. The central Ottoman government, specifically to Lat Pasha, actually sent a telegram to Rashid.

15:21Explicitly ordering that the harsh measures being taken against the Armenians should absolutely not be extended to other Christian groups like the Syriacs. They directly told Rashid to stop targeting them. But he entirely ignored the interior minister. He did. Rashid and his deputies simply found a bureaucratic loophole. They classified all Aramaic speaking Christians as Armenians. Wow. By applying that label, they declared them enemies of the state who had to be eliminated. Even though the central government sent those explicit orders to halt, Rashid faced zero consequences for ignoring them and continuing the massacres. This blatant lack of punishment leads many historians to debate whether the central orders from Talat were genuine attempts to stop the violence. Or simply a paper trail created as a front to appease protesting German and Austrian diplomats who were allied with the Ottomans. Here's where it gets really interesting though. Amidst all this slaughter and systemic violence, the source material makes it abundantly clear that this wasn't purely a linear story of defenseless victims quietly waiting for the end.

16:23Right. The virus organized armed resistance and tragically a vicious cycle of interethnic violence that emerged as the war dragged on. In the Turabden region, the situation developed quite differently than in Hikari or D.R. Brick Air. While many lowland villages in the area were completely wiped out, some mounted incredibly successful prolonged defenses. The villages of Iwardo and Azac stand out in the historical record. Azac, for instance, was a primarily Syriac Orthodox village. When Ottoman authorities demanded they hand over their Catholic and Protestant neighbors, the village refused. The fortified their positions and repelled heavy Ottoman military attacks for weeks. They held the line so fiercely that they eventually launched a surprise night attack, breaking the siege and forcing the Ottoman forces to agree to a truce on the village's own terms. It's a staggering story of survival against all odds. But the shifting power dynamics of resistance also took a very dark turn as the war progressed. They did. After the Russian forces completely withdrew following the 1917 Russian Revolution,

17:27the region of Urmia descended into total ethnic chaos. This raises an important question, or rather highlights a deeply uncomfortable truth about the brutalizing psychological effect of genocide and total war. By 1918, you had well-organized, battle-hardened Christian militias operating in Urmia led by military figures like Agapetros. When local Muslim populations and the Persian governor launched an armed uprising against these Christian groups, these Syrian militias didn't just defend themselves. No. They brutally crushed the uprising, killing hundreds and possibly thousands of local Muslims in the process. The victims of a genocide had, in that specific localized context, become the perpetrators of mass violence. The source quotes historian David Gaun, who observed that the Assyrian victims, when suddenly given the military advantage and the chance for revenge, turned without hesitation into perpetrators. It represents a complete, tragic breakdown of any long-standing societal links between the different ethnic and religious groups in the region.

18:28And shortly after this wave of violence, the spiritual and temporal leader of the Assyrians, the patriarch Marshamoon, went to negotiate a crucial alliance with a powerful Kurdish chieftain named Simkoshikak. And in a devastating blow to the Assyrian leadership, the patriarch is assassinated by Simkoshikak during those very alliance talks. Along with many of his bodyguards, this betrayal triggered a massive uncontrollable spree of revenge killings by Assyrian militias against local Kurdish populations, which in turn sparked horrific retaliatory massacres by Kurdish forces against any remaining Christians they could find. It was absolute unmitigated chaos. The total collapse of security forced tens of thousands of surviving Assyrians to flee south, desperately trying to reach British military protection in Mesopotamia. It was a harrowing ordeal all its own. They were constantly harassed by Kurdish air-regulars, ambushed by pursuing Ottoman forces, and dying of starvation and exhaustion along the route. Eventually, the survivors ended up in a massive, sprawling, British-run refugee camp in Bakuva,

19:33near Baghdad in modern-day Iraq. And the conditions in the Baku camp were incredibly poor, overcrowding, lack of sanitation, disease ran rampant. An estimated 7,000 Assyrians died of disease and exposure in that camp alone, having survived the massacres in the marches only to perish in exile. And to compound the tragedy after the war ended, despite various British promises of safe resettlement or autonomy, the Assyrians were never given an independent state. And the vast majority were never allowed to return to their ancestral homes in the mountains. So what does this all mean for us today? Let's talk about the legacy in the cold, hard numbers. The Assyria Chaldean delegation that attended the 1919 Paris Peace Conference estimated their community's losses at roughly 250,000 to 275,000 dead. To put that staggering number in perspective, that represents roughly half of their entire pre-war population. It is a demographic collapse from which the community has never fully recovered. Which brings us to a massive, lingering historical paradox. With a death toll that high, representing half of an entire civilization,

20:36why is the safe foes so much less known globally than the Armenian genocide which was happening in the exact same empire, ordered by the exact same government at exactly the same time? This raises an important question. And the source outlines a few key reasons for this glaring disparity in global recognition. First, as we discussed with the millet system, the Assyrians lacked a unified national identity. Because they identified primarily by their specific church denominations, rather than as a single ethnic group. Right, so mounting a collective global advocacy campaign in the aftermath of the war was incredibly difficult. Second, their extreme geographic isolation in places like Herkari meant there were far fewer international witnesses. Fewer journalists were foreign diplomats present to document the atrocities compared to the more globally connected Armenian populations in Major City. Exactly. Third, and perhaps most devastatingly, was the massive systematic destruction of their physical records. When institutions like that were burned to the ground,

21:37much of the documentary evidence of their existence, their culture, and their destruction was permanently erased from the historical record. And that profound erasure leads us directly into the current geopolitical reality regarding the safe foe. As we promised at the beginning of this deep dive, we were reporting this impartially, based strictly on the provided text. The legacy of the safe foe is deeply, often fiercely contested on the world stage today. On one side, you have the modern Assyrian diaspora. In the second half of the 20th century, as Assyrians migrated to Western countries with greater freedom of speech and political organization, the grandchildren of the original survivors began publicly sharing the stories their families had kept quiet for decades. By the 1990s, this diaspora community began heavily lobbying for formal international recognition of the safe foe as a genocide. And their lobbying efforts have seen tangible success on the international stage. According to the source, the International Association of Genocide Scholars formally recognized the Assyrian Genocide in 2007.

22:38Furthermore, several national parliaments, including the governments of Sweden, Armenia, the Netherlands, and Germany, have passed official resolutions explicitly acknowledging the events of the safe foe as a genocide. On the other side of this diplomatic battle, the modern Turkish government actively and vehemently denies that the safe foe constitutes a genocide. The source notes an interesting distinction. While Turkey has a highly vocal, incredibly structured campaign, denying the Armenian genocide, the government generally prefers to avoid discussing the safe foe altogether. When pressed on the international stage, or when justifications are offered by those denying the genocide label, they frequently point to the armed military resistance by some Assyrian groups. They cite the Highland Tribes' formal Declaration of War in Hikari, or the armed violent defenses in villages like Ozakh. Arguing that the Ottoman State was responding to an act of military rebellion and a security threat, rather than conducting a systematic, unprovoked extermination of a civilian population.

23:39It's a profound, open, historical fracture. As we've seen throughout the analysis, it involves incredibly dense layers of imperial ambition, localized bureaucratic brutality, the desperate complexities of armed resistance, and the lingering, heavily politicized scars of memory and state denial. It truly is. To briefly recap the immense ground we've covered today, we started in the incredibly isolated 13,000-foot peaks of the Hikari Mountains, where the Ottoman millet system kept an ancient people politically divided. We watched as the paranoid geopolitical chess match of World War One turn their mountain fortress into a deadly crossfire. By a single telegram from Talat Pasha, that tried to limit their very existence to isolated groups of 20, we tracked the devastating localized spread of the massacres across Persia, Bitless, and DR Bicker. Led by rogue governors and self-proclaimed Witcher battalions. And we examined the complex, morally gray reality of fierce armed resistance, a tragic cycle of interethnic retaliation in Urmia,

24:39and the harrowing fatal exile to the refugee camps of Bakbal. We analyzed a deeply volatile period where the map of the Middle East was redrawn in blood, leaving a legacy that is still being debated in parliaments around the world a century later. Thank you, listener, for joining us on this incredibly complex and heavy historical journey. But before we close the book on today's deep dive, I want to leave you with one final, lingering thought to mull over on your own. It's an important one. We talked about how the physical records of the Assyrian people, like the irreplaceable rare manuscripts in the diocese of CERT, were purposefully burned and destroyed by advancing forces. Complete cultural erasure. Because of that massive destruction, the memory of the SAFO wasn't preserved in textbooks or official state archives for decades. It was kept alive entirely through oral traditions, whispered stories and lamentations passed down from the traumatized survivors to their grandchildren in the diaspora. Through the generations. I want you to consider this.

25:40When the physical evidence of a people's history is systematically erased by an empire, how does the simple, deeply human act of singing a folk song or telling a story to your grandchild become the ultimate act of historical defiance? Wow. Till next time, keep diving deep. At Amika Insurance, we know it's not just what's inside your home that matters. It's who you share it with. That's why we work even harder to protect it. And as a mutual insurance company, we're built for our customers. We prioritize your needs and are here for you when you need us. Amika, empathy is our best policy. Visit amika.com and get a quote today. I'm here with SpinQuest, where you can play and win from the comfort of your own home with hundreds of slot games and all of the table games you love with real cash prizes. Right now, $30 coin packs are on sale for $10.

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