A Quiet Place Along the Khabour: Rescue and Survival in ‘the Abattoir of Shaddadeh’

The Armenian Weekly
April 2010 Magazine

The road to Der Zor—from Bab, Munbij, Meskene, Raqqa—is well documented in the memoirs of Armenian Genocide survivors and foreign eyewitness accounts. However, it wasn’t enough to arrive in Der Zor alive; deportees were driven to march further north along the Khabour River to a place where gendarmes thought no one would hear their cries for help. A letter from Jesse B. Jackson, the American consul of Aleppo, discussed the deportations north of the desert city as they began in June 1916, when Zeki Bey was appointed Ottoman governor, replacing his more lenient predecessor. According to Jackson, the deportations were systematic; Armenians were deported from the city according to their place of origin. “They were told that they would be conducted to certain villages on the Khabour River, which empties into the Euphrates below Deir, and were sent off under strong escorts of armed gendarmes. Some arrived at small villages on the Khabour, but the greater part were taken only hours from Deir al-Zor, where they were set upon by bands of Turkish, Circassian and Kurdish ex-convicts that had been liberated from prisons and taken there for that purpose. The most horrible butcheries imaginable occurred, the facts of which were related to me by a few survivors who miraculously escaped and who were given shelter by friendly Arabs and later returned to Aleppo after great hardships.”(1) Jackson recounts a period of intensified massacre in the summer of 1916 along the Khabour River. His account, when paired with those told by local descendants of survivors, indicates that buried under the lands north of Der Zor lay untold stories to be unearthed.(2)