The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was a short-lived (from 1942 to 1945) unit of the US Army Special Operations Forces during the Second World War. The OSS had two main tasks: to provide and process intelligence on Allied interests abroad and to conduct unconventional warfare. The first task was primarily pursued by the Research and Analysis (R&A) branch and was intended to produce intelligence that could contribute to the shaping of foreign policy. The second consisted of spreading propaganda behind enemy lines, conducting psychological warfare, and supporting local resistance movements.

On October 31, 1944, the OSS Research and Analysis branch produced the report “The Transfer of the Assyrians of Iraq: A short historical survey of the Assyrian minority in Iraq and its unsuccessful attempts at emigration.” The purpose of the report was to provide historical background on the situation of the Assyrian community in Iraq, which was ostensibly hoping “for resettlement by the Allies at the end of the war.” The report introduced the problem as follows:

Recent intelligence indicates that the leaders of the Assyrian minority in Iraq have decided to organize their followers in order to seek recognition at the Peace Conference, expressing the hope that, under the Atlantic Charter, the United States will aid them in finding a place to settle.

Why the United States, you might ask? Going back to the First World War, the US, unlike Britain and France, had no existing imperial stake in the Middle East. As a result, two Americans were chosen to do a survey of Ottoman lands to inform the negotiations of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Among other things, the conference deliberated on the best course of action for large swathes of land belonging to the Ottoman Empire, which had allied with Germany during the war. The Americans chosen for this project – educator Henry Churchill King and businessman Charles Crane – traveled Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and the territory of present-day Türkiye, assessed local opinion on the future of the region, and prepared recommendations for how the League of Nations should proceed. Their report, colloquially called the “King-Crane Commission,” was suppressed for several years following its creation.

The report found that the dominant wish across the region was for “self-determination” – a principle championed by then-American President, Woodrow Wilson. Arabs in the Levant wished for independence, which they believed Britain would support considering the promises it (Britain) had given during the war in exchange for Arab participation in the Middle Eastern theatre against Ottoman troops (known as the Arab Revolt). However, several conflicting discussions, including the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration, promised the land to others and made clear that Britain would not abandon its imperial ambitions.

The Great Powers, particularly Britain, France, and Italy, concluded that the Arab provinces should at least be separated from Turkish governance. Yet, having assessed the inhabitants’ capacity for self-rule, the Paris Peace Conference determined that the region wasn’t ready for independence. The King-Crane Commission reported that if they had to be placed under a mandate, the majority of those interviewed reported that they would prefer an American mandate rather than British or French due to the former’s lack of historical colonial exploitation of the region. King and Crane stated in their report that the success of the mandates would reveal the sincerity of the Allies’ professed aims regarding the treatment of these regions. They recommended that the Arabic-speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire be separated from the Turkish state, but otherwise as much territory as possible should be kept together, as this would enable unity and contribute to increased internal security.

In April 1920, the San Remo Conference decided on the question of the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire. Officials representing Britain, France, Italy, and Japan disregarded local wishes for independence and, in the case of a mandate, for American guardianship. Rather, decisions were made based on notions of racial superiority and imperial and economic interests. The territory was sliced into several zones of control, resulting in protectorates awarded to Britain and France for Iraq (Mesopotamia), Syria, and Palestine, and, later, Lebanon and Jordan. The discussions also resulted in a corresponding oil agreement splitting the revenue of oil production in Mosul between, again, Britain and France. American officials were acutely aware of the conference’s failures to respect local sentiment and integrate the knowledge that had been gathered on the regions being discussed. Awareness of this ignorance would inspire the later formation of centralised intelligence services, including the OSS, which sought to produce robust intel to guide foreign policy.

Fast forward two and a half decades, and the misguided, self-interested decisions of the Paris Peace Conference had contributed to, among other things, the episodic displacement of the region’s Assyrians.

For context, Assyrians were (and are) a distinct ethnoreligious community that generally claims descendance from the ancient Assyrians that once dominated the Middle East and ushered in an era of cultural, economic, and political eminence. Modern-day Assyrians are largely Christian, belonging to the Chaldean or Nestorian Church, and are geographically spread across southeastern Türkiye, northern Iraq, and northwestern Iran.

During WWI, Assyrians were numbered at approximately 155,000. Roughly half joined Allied forces during the war, fighting against the Ottomans until the Russian front gave out in 1917. By 1918, the fighters had to retreat, joining British forces in northern Iraq. Following the war, the territory of Hakkari (where many Assyrians had previously lived, and which was hoped by the British to be awarded to the Mesopotamian mandate) was granted to Türkiye by the Council of the League of Nations. Turkish and Kurdish forces again drove the Assyrians out of the country and massacred large numbers of those who remained. Mild success was achieved in resettling the group in northern Iraq, though this was threatened again by the departure of British forces following Iraq’s independence and admission to the League of Nations in 1932. Following the exit of British troops, many Assyrians fled across the border to Syria where they hoped to receive asylum by the French Mandate authorities. However, they were turned away and forced back across the border to Iraq, where they were set upon by Iraqi and Kurdish soldiers in what has become known as the Simele massacre. It was after this point that Assyrian leaders and the Iraqi government began imploring the League of Nations to find some long-term resettlement plan for the community, which now numbered just 25,000–30,000.

The OSS report concludes rather pessimistically, remarking that the League returned the question to the authorities of Iraq and Syria, declaring that this was a question of domestic assimilation rather than international adjudication.

American archaeologist William Albright, who had lived in Palestine and Syria, remarked that “the Christians of Syria have no more confidence in their eventual future as a minority in a Moslem [sic] state than the Nestorians (Assyrians) of Iraq or the Copts of Egypt, both of whom are hated and despised (quite unjustly) by the Moslems [sic].” This remark reflects a fundamental misunderstanding in the West around the nature of “Moslems’” hatred towards the Assyrians, which was mistakenly (by Albright and the OSS report) credited to their Christian beliefs, drawing parallels between the Assyrians and the Christians of Syria and Egypt. This also served to paint the Assyrians as a particularly sympathetic group to Western audiences, which were, of course, largely Christian themselves. One result of this was a large number of popular newspaper and magazine articles in Europe and the United States relaying the tragic question of Assyrian nationhood and resettlement.

The fundamental issue was not so much that a Christian community was trying to make a home for itself within a majority-Muslim country. Rather, animosity towards the group was based largely on its historical alliance with colonial Britain. The oversimplification of the conflict as one between ethnic and religious groups, whose sympathies and interests are irrevocably associated with their ethnoreligious identity, was based on the dominant European prioritisation of so-called “race science.” This philosophy, previously relied upon for justifying European expansion into Africa in the late 19th century, viewed “inherent, unchanging racial identities” as the basic foundations on which the strength and stability of a nation should be based, necessarily tying “ethnicity and race to citizenship and nationhood.” This logic would be used, not long after, to justify the partition of Palestine to construct a state to realise Zionist ambitions of Jewish self-determination outside of Europe (where Jews were still perceived to constitute a destabilising “fifth column” for European powers). No strangers to population transfers and social engineering during this period, the British in particular (and the League of Nations and, later, United Nations, in general) had a fondness for the utopian project of engineering peace through the segregation of nations along ethnic and religious lines.

Gradually, however, as the idea of national homelands lost its usefulness for the British and French, they began to pursue instead a reconstitution of ethnic and religious minority groups as distinct communities in need of protection by and assimilation into the nation-state. Such was the case for the Assyrians, for whom attempts were made for the rest of the 20th century (with varying degrees of success) to incorporate cultural identity and language into the broader state character. Despite periodic episodes of tension and exclusion, the Assyrian population in Iraq grew. However, following the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which created a security vacuum that enabled the growth of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, Assyrians were again the target of armed violence and executions, largely forced to flee the country once more. Before the American invasion, Assyrians in northern Iraq were numbered at approximately 1.5 million. In October 2022, the number was estimated at 142,000.

The founding of the OSS was inspired in part by; i) a realisation that the decisive outcomes of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference were not based on robust intelligence, ii) a prediction that acting in imperial interest would destabilise the region. The office hoped to rectify this in part by provisioning reliable intelligence which would serve as the foundation for future interventions. However, Americans such as King and Crane derived a good portion of their legitimacy and trust on the ground from the fact that the US did not have the same colonial legacy as Britain and France. Today, however, this legitimacy and trust has largely been eroded by the similarly ill-informed and self-interested interventions of the previous decades, resulting in largescale critiques of American actions that parallel those of imperial Britain and France earlier in the 20th century.

References

1 United States Office of Strategic Services, Research and Analysis Branch. “The Transfer of the Assyrians of Iraq.” UB 250 U33 no. 2696. Washington, 1944, ii. Retrieved from the Library of Congress on 30 May 2024.
2 Iğsız, Aslı. Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018.
3 Albright 1942, cited in “The Transfer of the Assyrians of Iraq: A short historical survey of the Assyrian minority in Iraq and its unsuccessful attempts at emigration,” 10.
4 Robson 2017: 8.
5 Albright, William F. “Japhet in the Tents of Shem.” Asia, 1942.
6 King, Henry Churchill and Charles R. Crane. “Report of the American Section of the International Commission on Mandates in Turkey”, August 28, 1919. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States. Paris: The Paris Peace Conference, 1919. Volume XII, Field Missions of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, Document 380, Paris Peace Conf. 181.9102/9 (Office of the Historian).
7 Minority Rights Group. “Assyrians in Iraq.” Retrieved 2 June 2024 from.
8 Robson, Laura. States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.
9 Sacquety, Troy J. “The Office of Strategic Services (OSS): A Primer on the Special Operations Branches and Detachments of the Office of Strategic Services.” General Arsof History. Retrieved 29 May, 2024.
10 United States Office of Strategic Services, Research and Analysis Branch. “The Transfer of the Assyrians of Iraq.” UB 250 U33 no. 2696. Washington, 1944. Retrieved from the Library of Congress on 30 May 2024.