Wikipedia:Today's featured article/October 14, 2022

The Sayfo, or Assyrian genocide, was the mass slaughter and deportation of Assyrian and Syriac Christians in southeastern Anatolia and Persia's Azerbaijan province committed by Ottoman forces and Kurdish tribes during World War I. The Assyrians lived in mountainous and remote areas and were divided into several mutually antagonistic churches. Mass killing of Assyrian civilians began in January 1915, by the Ottoman military and pro-Ottoman Kurds. Attacks on, massacres of and deportations of Christian populations continued until 1919, usually facing only sporadic armed resistance. Ottoman Assyrians living in present-day Iraq and Syria were not targeted. The Sayfo occurred concurrently with and was closely related to the Armenian genocide. Motives included a perceived lack of loyalty among some Assyrian communities to the Ottoman Empire and a desire to appropriate their land. In 1919 the Assyrians said that roughly 250,000 were killed in the genocide, about half the pre-war population.