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TURKEY : THE BLIGHT OF ASIA

Table of Contents 

APPENDIX TO THE BLIGHT OF ASIA

Page 3

    In the press of October 25, 1925, appeared an article by George Seldes, describing the persecution of the Christian Chaldeans, on the Turkish-British frontier, near Mosul. It was announced as the first of a series, but the other articles have not been published. It is so similar to the other well-authenticated happenings of a like nature described in the foregoing pages, that it forms a logical continuation of the narrative. I quote from the "Washington on Post" of October 25, 1925:

    Mosul, Mesopotamia, October 18 (By Mail to Cairo).—In a beautiful village oasis called Zakho, on the British-Turkish frontier in the biblical country, amidst peaceful surroundings, I found witnesses to-day to a terrible tragedy which Mohammedan Arabs as well as Christians asked me to relate to the Christian world.

    It is the story of the deportation of eight thousand Chaldean Christians from the frontier, of their march into the interior of Turkey, of how the Turks murdered men, violated women and threw infants over precipices. It is a story of suffering unparalleled in recent times and every word here written is sworn to on the Bible by chieftains of villages and their priests and attested by Archbishop Timothy, their spiritual father.  

OLD AND ILL SLAIN  

    "Will the Christian world believe that such things can happen now!" asked Archbishop Timothy as the Mukhtar—or sheif—of Murga, knelt and told his story. What the Mukhtar told in Arabic was this:"

    "As God is my witness and by the blood of Christ I swear that on the march north the Turks killed five men who, on account of their age, could not keep up with the procession. Three women who were ill they stoned to death. On the first night we camped near a fountain. The Turkish officers and soldiers put out the lights and seized all the young pretty girls and carried them to the fields. All night we heard the screams and cries of the girls and women. They clouded the skies with their mournful cries and it was like the Day of Judgment."

    "On the third day one of the women was in the pangs of childbirth. The Turks waited until the baby was born. Other women took the baby, but the mother was too feeble to march, so she was shot. At the Ozozan Mountains three men and two women who tried to escape were shot to death. Their young orphaned children were then killed."

    This statement, in colder official form, I saw later in records sworn to and attested by the British governor of Mesopotamia.

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