During and after the First World War, Ottoman and irregular forces killed and displaced Assyrian Christian communities in southeastern Anatolia and northwestern Persia. Violence was especially severe around Hakkari, Tur Abdin and Urmia. Survivors fled towards Iraq, Syria, the Caucasus and more distant diaspora communities.

Assyrian poems, church hymns, testimonies and oral laments preserved the catastrophe known as Sayfo, meaning the sword. Diaspora writers used Syriac and modern spoken languages to record vanished villages and sustain a threatened cultural identity.