Assyrians Commemorate Martyrs Day Worldwide

(AINA) — August 7 marks Assyrian Martyrs Day, a day to remember Assyrians (also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs) who lost their lives in defense of their culture and way of life. On this day Assyrians remember the victims of the genocides perpetrated against their nation, such as the Turkish genocide of Assyrians, called Seyfo (sword) by Assyrians, which claimed the lives of 750,000 Assyrians (75%) between 1915 and 1918, as well as the lives of 1.5 million Armenians and 1,000,000 Pontic Greeks.

August 7th was chosen because of the massacre of Assyrians in August, 1933 in the north Iraq. The massacre was conducted by the Iraqi Army and Arab and Kurdish irregulars. 3000 Assyrians in the town of Simmele were massacred in a three day period.
Here is an account of the Simmele Massacre by Colonel Stafford of the British Army:

A cold blooded and methodical massacre of all the men in the village then followed, a massacre which for the black treachery in which it was conceived and the callousness with which it was carried out, was as foul a crime as any in the blood stained annals of the Middle East. The Assyrians had no fight left in them, partly because of the state of mind to which the events of the past week had reduced them, largely because they were disarmed. Had they been armed it seems certain that Ismail Abawi Tohalla and his bravos would have hesitated to take them on in fair fight. Having disarmed them, they proceeded with the massacre according to plan. This took some time. Not that there was any hurry, for the troops had the whole day ahead of them. Their opponents were helpless and there was no chance of any interference from any quarter whatsoever. Machine gunners set up their guns outside the windows of the houses in which the Assyrians had taken refuge, and having trained them on the terror stricken wretches in the crowded rooms, fired among them until not a man was left standing in the shambles. In some other instance the blood lust of the troops took a slightly more active form, and men were dragged out and shot or bludgeoned to death and their bodies thrown on a pile of dead.
The Simmele massacre of Assyrians in 1933, as well as the Turkish genocide of Christians in World War One, inspired Raphael Lemkin to coin the word “genocide”

Though inspired by the Simmele massacre, August 7 has become a day to remember all Assyrian martyrs. Assyrians also commemorate April 24, but that is specific to the Turkish genocide of Assyrians in World War One.