(AINA) -- The Simmele Massacre of 1933 was not an abstract tragedy. It was a crime committed against the Assyrian people by the Iraqi army, with the participation of local Kurdish forces, resulting in the mass killing, displacement, and terrorization of an indigenous nation in its own homeland. Any commemoration of this atrocity must begin with an honest acknowledgment of responsibility.

It is therefore deeply disturbing that today, under the authority of the so-called Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the political successor of forces historically involved in Assyrian persecution, a memorial for the martyrs of Simmele is being promoted on a small parcel of originally Assyrian land, while at the same time approximately 370 acres of Assyrian land belonging to the village of Bakhetme remain confiscated or unlawfully occupied (story).

Related: Kurdish Confiscation of Assyrian Lands in North Iraq

This contradiction exposes a troubling reality: symbolic recognition is being offered while material injustice continues. Memorials cannot erase the fact that Assyrian lands are still being seized, villages emptied, and legal claims ignored under KRG governance. Honoring martyrs on a few acres does not absolve the ongoing dispossession of their descendants.

The involvement of Masoud Barzani and the KDP, alongside the public participation of Patriarch Mar Awa III, has intensified Assyrian concerns. In the absence of concrete steps toward land restitution and legal protection, such cooperation risks legitimizing occupation rather than confronting historical and present-day wrongdoing.

True remembrance requires more than stone and ceremony. It requires accountability, restitution, and an end to policies that perpetuate the very injustices that led to Simmele. Without justice for Assyrian lands, especially Bakhetme, commemoration becomes not an act of reconciliation, but a distortion of history.

The Assyrian people ask for nothing extraordinary, only that memory, truth, and justice stand together.