The Ottoman policy of slaughter and deportations in 1915, associated mainly with its Armenian victims, was actually much broader in its scope. Along with more than 1 million Armenians killed, it crushed also the Christian Syriac community, which counts its dead in the hundreds of thousands.

Armenians call the slaughter “the Great Calamity,” while Syriacs remember it as the “Seyfo Massacre” with “seyfo” meaning “sword.” On the 100th anniversary this year, the Syriacs are for the first time holding protests urging Turkey to recognize the Seyfo Massacre and to apologize. On April 21, Syriacs launched a hunger strike in the southeastern province of Mardin, where most of their ancestors perished. The protest, scheduled to end April 24, will last 100 hours, symbolizing the 100 years that have passed since the bloodshed. The Syriacs are also planning to hold a big march in June.

Leading the events is the Mardin Syriac Unity Association, which a Turkish court ordered closed earlier this month over several provisions in its charter. According to its chairman, Yuhanna Aktas, 490,000 Syriacs perished in 1914-15 in Mardin and its environs, where the community was concentrated, with local Kurdish tribes and the state-founded Hamidiye Corps leading the massacres.

Those who survived include people who fled to Syria as well as teenage girls and children who were Islamized, Aktas told Al-Monitor, adding that many people in the Mardin region today are the grandchildren of those Islamized Syriac women. “They would call Syriacs ‘uncles.’ Hundreds are calling us ‘uncles’ today,” Aktas, himself a Mardin resident, said.