Syriacs commemorate their massacre
▻http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/04/turkey-syriacs-commemorate-the-centennial-tragedy-armenians.html
The Syriacs, also known as Assyrians or Arameans, are an ancient Mesopotamian people who were among the first to adopt Christianity and are perhaps best known today for retaining their Aramaic language, a variant of which was the language of Jesus Christ. Never very populous, they were decimated by about half in the massacres of Anatolian Christians that began in 1915. Although these killings officially targeted Armenians, neither Ottoman authorities nor local Kurds made a distinction between the Christian peoples in southeastern Anatolia, famously arguing that “an onion is an onion, no matter what its color.” Scholars estimate that up to 300,000 Syriacs were killed. Emigration of the survivors from the region continued for the rest of the century. The vast majority are dispersed around the globe today with the events of 1915 seared into their collective memory as the Year of the Seyfo, or Year of the Sword.
While the world prepares to commemorate what has become known as the Armenian genocide, however, the Syriacs are still struggling for international recognition of their ancestors’ fate. “The Assyrian genocide has remained somewhat in the shadow of the Armenian genocide,” Sabri Atman, director of the Swedish-based Seyfo Center for Assyrian Genocide Research, told Al-Monitor. “Historians and politicians have not been sensitive enough to the issue.”