“Living amidst the Kurds, we find various Christian communities, of different languages and creeds. The most numerous of these used to be the Armenians. Greater Armenia, where the largest concentration of Armenians lived, coincides with present eastern Turkey (or northern Kurdistan). The relations between Kurds and Armenians were usually politically unequal, the latter often being economically exploited and at times violently oppressed by Kurdish chieftains. In order to avoid oppression, unknown numbers of Armenians in the late nineteenth century became Muslims and opted for a Kurdish identity. A European visiting the Dersim district (present Tunceli) in the early twentieth century noted that many of the local Alevis or Qizilbash were in fact recently converted Armenians. Due to the mass deportation and massacres of 1915 (during which Kurds participated in the killings), very few Armenians are left in the region now. Most of the survivors of the massacres left either for the Caucasus, where an Armenian republic was established, or emigrated to Europe or America. There are still small communities in the towns of Diyarbakir and Derik (near Mardin), and a few remaining Armenian villages. I have, moreover, come across small groups of half-Kurdicized Armenians in villages south of Siirt; they were kurdophone and called themselves Kurds without attempting to hide their Armenian origins. The Nestorians used to be concentrated in Hakkari near the present Turkish-Iraqi border; tribally organized and fierce warriors, they formed political alliances with Kurdish tribes against rival Assyrian and Kurdish tribes. Since the mid nineteenth century, massacres and wars have reduced their numbers and dispersed them over northern Iraq and the neighbouring districts of Iran. Many of the survivors have fled the region altogether for Baghdad, Tehran or the United States. Until the early twentieth century, the Suryani of Tur Abdin also took part in Kurdish tribal alliances and oppositions and held their own quite well. They suffered much in the First World War, however, and many left the Tur Abdin for French-occupied Syria in the following years. Migration to Istanbul and, from the 1960s on, western Europe, in search of employment and greater security, further drained the resilience of the communities remaining in the Tur Abdin. There also used to be small Jewish minorities, mainly urban, throughout Kurdistan, but almost all of these have left for Israel. Over the past century, all non-Muslim communities in Kurdistan have very significantly declined in numbers due to massacres, flight and, to a lesser extent perhaps, religious conversion. The position of those remaining has become precarious, and the Suryani and Ezidis of Turkey, at least, have apparently decided that their communities have no future there, and are making efforts for all their members to move to western Europe.”
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