This valuable book has finally been translated in its entirety to English from the original Assyrian language (neo-Syriac). It is an important book because the accounts are mostly from Assyrians themselves. Those who were there at the most critical period in the recent and tumultuous history of the Assyrian people. The author was a warrior, soldier, and a leader of his tribe and was from the well-known Malik Ismael family of Upper Tyareh. It has specific facts and details not found in any other book. It includes a detailed account of the betrayal and murder of H.H. Mar Benyamin Shimun XIX the Patriarch who was the spiritual and temporal leader of his Assyrian community during WWI. It also includes details of the negotiations between the Assyrians and the British-controlled Iraqi government, which eventually led to what is known as the Simele Massacre by the Iraqi government and the exodus of a part of the community from Iraq to Syria in 1933.
This book also includes details of many of the battles during 1914 to 1933 of the Assyrians of the Hakkari mountains in southeastern Turkey and their brethren in today's northwestern Iran. They fiercely defended themselves and their families against the brutal assaults of the Turks, Kurds, Iranians, and Arabs. They were usually outnumbered and outgunned, but they were often victorious as their enemy broke ranks and ran. They were eventually forced to leave their ancestral homeland in southeastern Turkey and northwestern Iran, where they had lived happily since time immemorial, and ended up in Iraq where the British needed their fighters. This book details the military alliance of those Assyrians with the Russians and then the British and the pledges those governments made and broke repeatedly regarding a semi-independent Assyrian settlement, culminating in the Simele Massacre, a permanent stain on the Iraqi state.
