The Octopus of Denial: Kurds, the Massacres of the Syriacs and Armenians, and the New Syria

A few months later, the same occurred in Suwayda governorate, where hundreds of members of the Druze community were killed and dozens of their villages burned, following the same patterns and causes.

The new Syrian authorities have taken no concrete measures to prosecute or hold the perpetrators accountable, aside from forming a “symbolic” investigative committee, which issued meager findings regarding the Alawite massacres after months of what it described as “field investigations.” The Ministry of Justice, in turn, established another committee to look into what happened in Suwayda governorate.

Alongside this “governmental failure,” Syria’s various cultural, social, and political sectors have produced nothing of real value or substance in relation to these horrific events. Their responses were mired in extreme sectarian, regional, and political polarization, lacking clear condemnation, and devoid of meaningful definitions, framing, or context. Instead, procrastination, justification, simplification, and outright denial dominated the logic in which these events were addressed.

This comes at a time when all active parties in the country remain entirely incapable of managing the “justice” file for the victims of events over the past years—events in which hundreds of thousands of civilians perished during the country’s protracted civil war, most as a result of identity-based confrontations along sectarian, ethnic, or religious lines.

The overarching pattern is that each community accuses the others of negligence or outright refusal to acknowledge, admit, or take responsibility for having committed identity-based mass killings against other communities—whether during the years of Syria’s drawn-out civil war or in the events that followed.

This article seeks to unpack the reasons behind the “impossibility” of such acknowledgment happening—whether now or in the foreseeable future—due to the deep psychological, social, and political complexities involved. It does so by examining a pivotal episode in modern Syrian history: the persistent accusations leveled by Assyrian, Syriac, and Armenian nationalist communities against their Kurdish counterparts, holding them responsible for participating in the genocide that targeted these ethnic groups during the final years of the Ottoman Empire (1915–1923), through their collaboration with Ottoman authorities.

Many Kurdish politicians, intellectuals, and elements of the Kurdish/Syrian and non-Syrian Kurdish collective consciousness deny these allegations, relying on a stockpile of evasive arguments, instrumental reasoning, and verbal sleights-of-hand to deflect blame and exonerate themselves at any cost.

The author believes this mechanism will persist for a long time as a defining feature of intercommunal relations in Syria, and as the primary mode through which communities construct their narratives of modern history.

A few months before the fall of the former Syrian regime, a public transport company based in Qamishli—and owned by Assyrian/Syriac businessmen—refused to transport a shipment of books because one of the titles contained the word “Kurdistan.” The incident sparked widespread condemnation among Kurdish civil activists, cultural figures, and commentators, who labeled it an “act of racism,” linking it to a long-standing history of resentment and tense relations that Assyrian/Syriac and Armenian communities in Syria’s northeast have harbored toward the Kurds for decades.

The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, in cooperation with the Syriac Union Party, managed to engineer a “patched-up” resolution to the incident. Still, for several days, lengthy debates and sharp exchanges unfolded, with Kurdish commentators focusing on what they considered “the core of the matter”: the underlying resentment and hostility that members of the Assyrian/Syriac and Armenian communities hold toward the Kurds—as individuals, as a people, and as a political project. In their view, the incident was nothing more than an expression and symbolic representation of the root issue.

A Thorn Under the Nail

At its core, the incident exposed a deeply layered and highly complex issue in the socio-political and cultural fabric of the region. For this reason, the polished rhetoric of “national unity,” “cultural sophistication,” and “social etiquette”—with its carefully manicured statements and cool, neutral postures—was utterly incapable of absorbing it.

It would not be far from the truth to describe the psychological, social, and political stance of a large segment of Assyrians and Armenians in northeast Syria toward the Kurds as one of resentment and negativity—lacking the warmth, openness, and mutual familiarity that one would expect from long-term coexistence between neighboring communities, particularly among the three ethnic groups in this region, whose histories have been intertwined for so long that their “founding moment” is nearly impossible to pinpoint.

Acknowledging this “painful truth” does not erase the nuances surrounding it, nor does it deny the many forms of everyday coexistence among individuals from these communities. The region has never witnessed large-scale communal violence between them, nor overt, spontaneous displays of racism. The resentment and negativity remain largely implicit, surfacing only through subtle yet telling behaviors and indicators, and erupting in moments of acute crisis—what could be called the “hard times” in intercommunal relations, rare in historical terms but revealing of what lies in the collective memory and mutual sentiments between communities.

Kurdish cultural and social elites frequently point to and condemn Assyrian/Syriac and Armenian resentment, but often in an emotionally detached and intellectually superficial manner, framing their position on this “resentment” without grappling with the actions, tools, and causes that have produced and sustained it to this day. Many Kurdish elites avoid asking the more urgent and culturally responsible question in such fraught intercommunal contexts: the “why.” They tend to lean toward what they consider obvious, telling themselves, “They don’t like us because we are Kurds!” Afraid to pursue the mountains of things hidden behind them, they fear confronting the arsenal of truths that might reveal the cause of their “misfortune.”

Much of the resentment carried by Assyrians/Syriacs and Armenians toward the Kurds is not rooted in Marxist notions of class or patterns of labor within a community. Rather, it stems from a political and wartime origin: the two sides having been positioned on opposite ends of a ‘genocide’—perpetrators and victims.

The genocide that targeted Armenians and Assyrians/Syriacs—known as the Sayfo—during the final years of the Ottoman Empire effectively ended the demographic presence of these two peoples in the region, transforming them from nations spread across their historic geography into mere ethnic and religious minorities. This transformation became central to the political, psychological, social, cultural, and even spiritual identities of those who survived.

The genocide left Assyrians/Syriacs and Armenians as fragile populations, incapable of forming any viable political project due to their loss of demographic weight and territorial sovereignty, unlike other regional nations—such as Turks, Arabs, and Persians—or even the Kurds in Iraq, who achieved some of their national aspirations and continue to pursue them elsewhere.

In the political literature, historical narrative, and popular memory of these two communities, there are persistent accusations that Kurds participated extensively in the massacres—acting as partners to the Ottoman state, its army, and the political organizations that carried out the genocide.

The collective memory and historical narrative of Armenians and Assyrians/Syriacs are replete with accounts accusing Kurds of involvement in every detail of the genocide—whether as tribal formations sanctioned by the Ottoman army (“Hamidiye cavalry”) or as Kurdish communal/tribal groups that exploited the Ottoman campaign of destruction to kill, seize property, and eliminate their traditional counterparts in the four eastern Ottoman provinces of Erzurum, Van, Diyarbakir, and Mamuret-ul-Aziz. Parts of two of these provinces later became part of Syrian territory. The most objective estimates suggest that two-thirds of these communities perished in the events.

Kurdish elites often avoid engaging in a serious and transparent discussion about this history—and, before that, fail to grasp the event’s meaning and role in shaping the ethnic identity and collective memory of Assyrians/Syriacs and Armenians.

The Kurdish counterparts, always in their vast majority but not absolutely, do not understand the highly complex and cumulative motives and dynamics that created that historical event and transformed it into a central narrative and an almost unique story in the identity of the Assyrian and Armenian communities and their awareness of themselves and the world. the platform and tool on which they measure everything and define every relationship, the primary and constant source of what they consider to be “the shape of the world around them.”

For a whole century, from the time of the genocide until now, the Kurds have remained in the collective consciousness and conscience of the two communities as they were in the “great narrative of genocide,” as accused and involved in what happened, and consequently as the cause of the fate that befell the two communities. The Kurds were confined to this “sinful” position, and their status has not changed over time, because these two groups have remained centered on their founding narrative, which they have not abandoned as the primary basis of their national identity and collective consciousness. Thus, they were unable to transform their consciousness of the movement of history and their relationship with other groups, particularly the Kurds.

Whereas the final years of the Ottoman Empire have become “the past” for dominant ethnic groups—who went on to secure states, presence, and representation among nations—they have never become “the past” for Armenians and Assyrians/Syriacs. For them, the genocide was the “Big Bang” that reshaped the very origins of things, realities, and existence—their existence and their truth. It was so catastrophic that life afterward could never be rebuilt on acceptable terms, having erased two entire peoples from history and geography (three, if we include the later experience of Greek Orthodox communities).

Kurdish condemnation of the current resentment directed against them often rests on the assumption that what happened is simply “in the past,” and that prudence and “morality” dictate it should no longer be remembered or invoked, forgetting that the processes and conditions of “engineering forgetting” are not the same for every community.

Communities most capable of building a stable present—through modernization, the creation of institutions, and new forms of security—are also those most capable of breaking with the past, employing strategies of forgetting, forgiveness, transcendence, and reconciliation with former “perpetrators.”

Assyrians/Syriacs and Armenians, however, have been unable to “engineer forgetting” due to the unique political, cultural, and demographic forces that continue to center the genocide in their collective memory and keep it alive in the present. This constant reinforcement strengthens its power to block any possibility—even partial—of moving beyond it, making it difficult for Kurds to exit their entrenched place in these communities’ perception.

This is a reality that Kurdish elites—cultural, political, and social—often fail to grasp, and frequently have no desire to confront. Instead, they settle for the convenient, truncated refrain: “They don’t like us because they don’t like us.”

Inflammation in Memory

The Ottoman genocide was the final narrative of the “Innocence Biography” that nearly all Christian communities circulate internally, in an unspoken manner—a grand, overarching account of the “oppression and marginalization they endured under the dominance and hegemony of Muslims.”

For that reason, relinquishing the genocide narrative is, in a sense, a step toward dismantling the overarching collective historical account—and all that follows from it. This is an extremely difficult undertaking, for it requires a complete and absolute demolition of what members of the Christian communities in these countries have long called “historical truth.” In practice, human communities are rarely able to abandon what they consider “historical truth,” for it is the most effective mechanism for framing their cohesion and ensuring their continuity within the arc of history—or what they believe it to be.

Another factor that further solidifies the presence and persistence of this painful memory in the Assyrian and Armenian consciousness is the way in which the “genocide question” was ultimately settled, a process marred, in many ways, by what, in post–Civil War Spain under General Franco in the 1930s, came to be called a “dishonorable peace.”

The Assyrians and Armenians carry a particular bitterness toward this outcome. On top of the genocide and their erasure from history, they received no recognition or acknowledgment from any of the actors involved—whether states, political parties, or social groups, be they Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Laz, or others. There were no trials or punishments for individual perpetrators, no forms of recognition or apology, and certainly no compensation or restoration of rights in light of what had taken place.

Part of Assyrian and Armenian resentment stems from the arrogance of the perpetrators, from their disregard for the injustice and moral failure of what occurred, even after years and decades had passed. For this reason, they view the genocide as a deeply ingrained trait in the perpetrators’ very nature. Even the most culturally sensitive intellectuals of the dominant group, and even its most left-leaning parties, have refrained from uttering the necessary truths or proposing meaningful avenues of redress.

The bitter memory of genocide remains thick and ever-present in the collective consciousness of the Assyrians and Armenians, because it is still acutely relevant. The two sides of the crime—perpetrators and victims—continue to share the present: the ownership of villages, the names of towns, the identities of cities, the affiliation of lands. A highly charged political rivalry and cultural struggle persists over the question of the “rightful historical owners”—their origin, their ownership, and the rights of each side—between the Assyrians and Armenians on one side, and their Kurdish counterparts on the other.

What happened did not deliver the “final blow” to history or the future of the geography. Instead, it left behind countless “orphans,” compelled to endlessly regurgitate what had occurred, blaming the past for all the bitterness of their current “orphanhood.” They perceive the present only as a deviation from the natural course that should have continued and created a more just life for them, were it not for that genocide.

Just as the image of Atatürk—displayed in every institution, facility, and public space in Turkey, in his military uniform, with his idealized quotes and piercing gaze—reminds every Kurd in present-day Turkey of the victory won by the Turks under his leadership, and the defeat suffered by the Kurds, becoming, in their eyes, the cause of every subsequent Kurdish tragedy, so too does the memory of genocide haunt the Assyrians and Armenians in an inverted way: it gazes at them constantly, injecting every detail of their present lives with bitterness, telling them that their current miserable condition is the natural offspring of the seed of genocide that once was.

The Roots of “Kurdish Fear”

In the face of all this, the Kurdish cultural, political, and social elites in particular possess only meager tools—ill-suited to addressing this enduring pain of their historical neighbors and partners, whom they lived alongside for countless centuries. These tools are equally unworthy of any modernist or rights-based aspiration with which the Kurds often identify themselves, considering themselves the group most subjected to injustice and oppression throughout the past century.

The collective Kurdish response, in its near totality, resorts to a mixture of fabrication, denial, and condescension when addressing what happened in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, or in the subsequent imbalanced and unfriendly bilateral relations. Just as they deny the genocide and their participation in it, so too does the Kurdish collective consciousness act similarly toward all its subsequent consequences. It rejects the resentment and negativity felt toward them by the Assyrian/Syriac and Armenian communities, and treats the matter with condescension—an attitude that is among the most wounding and painful for their counterparts.

The Kurdish neglect of an event foundational to the consciousness of their neighbors, an event that shaped their entire modern life and the network of their cultural, social, and political relations with their surroundings, is a form of “ongoing genocide.” For it avoids dismantling the past, thereby preventing its transcendence, and sends a profoundly harsh message to the victims, saying, in effect, “Nothing happened that merits attention,” thereby stripping away any value from the blood that was shed.

Kurdish cultural literature, political discourse, and social narratives are extremely poor in addressing what took place, except in ways that conform to their functional vision. Indeed, it is difficult for a researcher to find a single Kurdish intellectual or scholar who has addressed the events objectively, using neutral scholarly tools, without prior position or aspiration. All Kurdish narratives lack what might be called “human courage”: they place nationalist interests and ideologies first, and build their reading of history accordingly. Kurdish political parties and movements are in constant alignment with nationalist aspirations, and, because of this, they neither engage with nor express anything of substance on the Assyrian/Syriac and Armenian question, believing it might harm their nationalist visions and assumptions. Alongside this lies a social structure that, by and large, rejects anything that “contaminates its imagination or self-image,” and thus aligns with the intellectual and political elites’ views.

The Kurds possess a vast arsenal of arguments and tools that help them deny and ignore what happened—tools that, not coincidentally, mirror those employed by Arabs, Turks, and Persians against the Kurds themselves, in denying, ignoring, and erasing another great truth: the injustice and genocide that befell the Kurds and crushed them for an entire century, at the hands of Arab, Turkish, and Persian actors.

The Kurdish stance toward the “Assyrian/Syriac and Armenian genocide” and the sweeping accusations leveled against them are drawn entirely from the “lexicon of nationalist logic in denial,” wherein, in all situations, a nationalist group fearful for its present denies what it committed in the past. Turks and Arabs, for instance, believe that acknowledging the genocide against the Kurds on the basis of ethnic identity would inevitably lead to demands affecting current geography and politics, thereby diminishing what they consider their “share of the land” at a time when they are driven by competing aspirations to expand what is already in their possession. They are steeped in ideological narratives that tell them constantly: “What you have obtained is far less than what justice would grant you,” and that others have usurped what was rightfully theirs in terms of countries and territories.

The Kurds today are afflicted by the condition of lacking sovereignty over any geographical area they consider their historical land and rightful possession—a condition they have expended all efforts to assert, and then to achieve. They believe that admitting guilt or acknowledging participation in the Armenian–Assyrian/Syriac genocide would deprive them of the ability to secure what they are striving to assert in the present—their right, ownership, and sovereignty over land—and would prevent them, in the future, from realizing their aspirations, for they would then be like others—like their “enemies”—mere participants in the great machinery of “other people’s genocide.”

In the depths of the Kurdish collective unconscious, as in other nationalist groups, lies a great deal of self-interested thinking and ideology inclined toward appropriation, preferred over any inconvenient truth that might contradict their interests, their self-image of history and the present, or the just rights of others.

Like other nationalists, Kurdish nationalists are inclined toward a functional reading and understanding of history and facts, shaped by their aspirations. So much so that, due to the intense use of this functional logic of history, history itself has come to match their interests and vision—visions they have transformed into “truths” and “self-evident realities” that are nearly impossible to dismantle. As a result, they have become prone, like other nationalists, to all forms of verbal violence and accusations of national and patriotic treachery against anyone who attempts to challenge or dismantle their historical imagination, especially if that challenger belongs to the same national structure as the group itself.

Four Legs of the Octopus of Denial

Over the years, and like other nationalists, the Kurds have built a strategy and arsenal of “denial and neglect” around the Assyrian/Armenian genocide. This strategy rests on four levels or tools, each capable of dismantling, dismissing, or denying any massacre or genocide in history. These are purely abstract mental games, not objective ways of reckoning with what happened.

First: “They started it.”

The Kurds, particularly their politicians and intellectuals, recount countless historical events, each intended to prove that Armenian rebels and organizations were the ones who initiated assassinations and acts of violence against the Kurds. This narrative resembles the persistent Ba‘athist propaganda used against the Kurdish liberation movement in Iraq, which accused the peshmerga forces of provoking clashes first, labeling them “insurgents.” It is also akin to Turkish propaganda against Kurdish fighters, branding them “Marxist atheists.”

Regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of many such Kurdish accounts, certain essential questions remain ever-present: What was the status of Armenians and Assyrian Syriacs within the Ottoman state at the outbreak of events? Were they not merely citizens of a highly militarized and violent state? Even their armed organizations (a description that applies partially to Armenians but not at all to Assyrian Syriacs)—were they not, in essence, liberation movements resisting a collapsing empire, engaged solely in self-defense? And even if they committed certain acts here and there, could these possibly be commensurate with the sweeping annihilation inflicted upon them by the Ottoman army and the Kurdish units and factions allied with it?

But before all else: did the genocide truly begin in 1915, allowing us to determine what came “first” and “second”? Or was genocide an ongoing process spanning decades? Even a novice researcher could find abundant evidence of atrocities committed against these two ethnic groups in the two decades preceding the genocide, during what is historically known as the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896. And the most unsettling question: did the genocide target Armenian and Assyrian Syriac rebels and political organizations, or did it target entire peoples—children, civilians, women, and the full scope of their human and social structures?

There is a parallel to all of this, one that can be answered using the same reasoning, in the Arab/Kurdish dynamic in Iraq. The majority of Iraqi “Arabs” deny what happened to the Kurds in the late 1980s during the “Anfal Campaign.” When cornered by the facts, they simply repeat: “They brought it upon themselves.” This disregards basic logical truths, such as the fact that the peshmerga forces were merely lightly armed formations defending themselves and their existence against a state that deployed aerial bombardment and chemical weapons for mass extermination. They were a liberation movement facing a state built upon vast institutions, armies, and inexhaustible resources.

Moreover, such deniers ignore the reality that the actual genocide did not occur solely at the moment of the Anfal Campaign’s execution in the late 1980s, but had begun years earlier—when the Iraqi state denied the very existence of a Kurdish people in the country, and did everything politically, culturally, militarily, and administratively to turn that false claim into an accepted truth. Another obvious question follows: did the Anfal Campaign—and similar, countless experiences of genocide—truly target fewer than ten thousand peshmerga fighters? Or did they target the Kurdish civilian and population infrastructure, from Germiyan and Kirkuk to Bahdinan, passing through Barzan and the Feyli Kurds in Baghdad?

Second: “The beautiful flattening.”

When discussion begins about what happened, the Kurds often summon what might be described as a “garden of beauty,” stories that revolve around coexistence, love, partnership, and a shared destiny with their Assyrian Syriac and Armenian counterparts during those times. There is hardly a Kurdish family or tribe without a central tale in its collective memory: of a grandfather who married an Armenian woman, an uncle who protected and raised an orphaned Syriac child, relatives whose Armenian or Syriac neighbors were treated as family members, or tribal leaders who hosted Armenian and Syriac families—and so on.

Even if many of these narratives are indeed true—by virtue of the lived proximity they describe—they are not so widely told and circulated in Kurdish circles without serving a purpose: the desire to obtain a sort of historical “certificate of innocence” for what occurred. These glowing depictions are deliberately presented to deny the darker side of events, to negate the possibility that the reverse might have been true.

If all such accounts are accurate and should indeed be preserved as part of the broader historical mosaic of the region, there still remain sharp questions that the beautiful narrative cannot leap over. Why is there always a story of an “Armenian or Syriac grandmother,” but never a tale where the grandfather was Assyrian Syriac or Armenian, and the grandmother Kurdish? Why is the orphaned, lost child always Armenian or Assyrian, while the protector is Kurdish? Are these not all indicators of the power dynamics embedded within these stories—stories shaped by the dominance of one group over another, transforming their relationship into that of victor and vanquished, perpetrator and victim?

Before that, why is there nothing else in the Kurdish collective memory? Where are the everyday, lived accounts, confirmed by documents and evidence, of neighbors annihilating their neighbors, of villages, rural areas, and towns reduced to mere ruins, of millions of people who vanished suddenly from history’s civil register, of a people who had been here for centuries and then, suddenly and simply, were gone? (Lord of the heavens!)

This flattening of history serves denial, it wraps the wound without treating it. It is much like the Arab deniers of the Kurdish genocide, who say their Kurdish neighbors in the central and southern cities of Iraq were the dearest people to them, without asking: “But why were there Kurdish exiles in southern and central Iraq, and not the other way around?” Or Iraqi Arab army officers who never tire of recounting stories of their compassion toward Kurdish prisoners and villagers, without telling anyone: “Why compassion in the first place? Is not every act of compassion itself proof of dominance?” Why were there always Arab jailers and Kurdish prisoners, never the reverse? Or the tales of affluent Iraqi Arabs praising the loyalty and work ethic of Kurdish laborers, without telling us: “Why were the Kurds in this country always laborers and never landowners?” And before all of that, where are the stories of the tens of thousands of Kurds who perished in mass graves, in Nuqrat al-Salman prison, and in the security branches of Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah? Why is there not a single story about them in the Arab collective memory? Are these absences not, in the end, confirmation of precisely what such denial seeks to obscure?

Third: “It wasn’t us, it was the state.”

As for the Kurds who take a step forward and acknowledge that a genocide was committed against the members of the two peoples—and who, after conceding some degree of Kurdish participation in it, or participation by certain Kurds—go on to submerge that admission in a flood of prefaces and riddles. They assert that those Kurds who took part were merely “followers and agents” of the Ottoman state, its army, and its ambitions, thereby effectively absolving their collective self of any admission of guilt or responsibility. They add that the Kurds, at the time, did not have a state, nor was there any Kurdish political entity, party, or authority that initiated or drove such actions.

This is identical to the “traditional tactic” employed by every national or religious group in the aftermath of its involvement in genocide: to attribute it to a particular apparatus, authority, ideology, party, or leader—washing the hands of the larger group of the accursed stain through this simplified puzzle, and shielding its collective self from any taint.

Iraqi Arabs, for example, viewed what was done to the Kurds as nothing more than “crimes of the Ba’ath Party,” as though it had descended from Mars, carried out this genocide, and then departed—without telling us how and why a clear majority of them joined this very criminal “Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party,” and why, even decades after its fall, they continued to venerate its leader, Saddam Hussein.

The same is true of how certain “Muslims” understood the Yazidi genocide, is nothing more than “the actions of a deviant faction,” without telling anyone about the intellectual and doctrinal sources from which this faction drew in carrying out its acts. Or why, for example, the cultural and media spaces, and social media platforms, across the Muslim world did not witness an outcry condemning the crimes perpetrated by this “deviant faction.” Nor did they examine the mindset, discourse, and religious ideology that drove “Muslim” individuals—neighbors to the Yazidis on the very night before the events—to, the following day, loot their neighbors’ homes, enslave their women, and annihilate their men.

The Kurds wield the succinct phrase, “We did not have a state at the time,” to deflect any responsibility, and to deny the reality of the Kurdish collective consciousness, which—in all its dimensions—was a political consciousness, aware of its interests and its position at that particular moment in history. With few exceptions, that political mindset sought to empty “Kurdish” geography of others, was imbued with the values and strategies of appropriation, and aspired to seize the property and lives of others—doing all it could to expel them from the present and the future. And if the Kurdish perpetrators were “merely individuals,” then why, for instance, does Kurdish musical, cultural, and social memory retain no pejoratives or negative positions toward them, indeed, why is the opposite almost true? Why is there, for example, a “general silence” about what those individuals did? The Kurds, after all, are a people whose folk and popular songs are abundant; yet in this entire musical heritage there is not a single song condemning a Kurdish killer who brutalized his Assyrian or Armenian neighbor.

Fourth: Nihilism

Finally, when the denialist mindset exhausts all its objective tools, it turns to the highest degree of fabrication: stripping what happened of its concrete reality. Any Kurdish interlocutor might respond to others by saying: “But they too would have done the same, had Russia defeated the Ottoman Empire in the war.”

This reasoning embodies every form of deceit, for it pulls reality and actual events into the realm of the hypothetical and the imagined, emptying history of all its tangible facts, and turning it into nothing more than a vast arena for clashing ideas and suppositions.

If such logic were valid as a tool for refutation and denial, perpetrators and victims would always be placed on equal footing—except that the latter simply never had the chance to be perpetrators. All issues and events would thus be rendered devoid of value or meaning, for they would equate lived life and concrete events with assumptions and expectations. By that absurd logic, a criminal who attacks an elementary school and slaughters its pupils is no different from those very pupils, who—if they had grown up—might have become criminals themselves.

This nihilistic logic admits involvement in genocide, yet frames it as a routine and morally acceptable act, for it claims to have defended the collective self and warded off supposed, similar fates. Such nihilism is not mere denial of genocide; it is a form of sustained complicity in it, for it transforms genocide into “something ordinary,” and often, into a so-called “moral imperative.”

The Forbidden Well

The extended family of the author of these lines hails from a village called Doudan, located a few kilometers northwest of the city of Qamishli. South of that village lies a well known as “the Forbidden Well.”

The women of the village do not use the water from this well, owing to a story passed down for decades: that the killers who waylaid the Armenian–Assyrian–Syriac death marches and deportation convoys, after committing crimes against the women in those columns, would murder them and throw their bodies into this well.

Until quite recently, Syriac and Armenian Christians, such as the Kouj family and others, would still come to our village for trade and business. Passing near that well, they would imagine and remember what had taken place there. Yet no one ever asked them, even once: “What do you feel?”