Shimon slowly recovered. Once well enough, he set out to find the family members still missing. In one camp he found our eldest brother, his wife Biyaz, and their child. They said that after Mar Shimun’s murder, while hiding in the grain store at Kuhna Shahr, seven bullets had been fired at them. All seven struck Shimon‘s wife. She nevertheless survived and was taken wounded to the American hospital in Khosrova.
Shimon told Biyaz to be ready with her son, then went to check on his wife. Finding that she had recovered, he collected her from the hospital, brought our eldest brother and his family, and reunited everyone with us at Golozan.
We rejoiced to see the surviving members of the family, but our happiness was mingled with grief and fear. We were still captives. Each day brought new reports: that the Christian forces had taken Urmia, then Dilman, and now intended to march on Khoy.
One day a Nestorian neighbour named Maryam called, “Hey, Jew, come here!”1 She offered to dress me in their clothes, give me a belt and pistol, and take me looting in Dilman. I was a child, and the prospect of adventure delighted me.
Maryam put me in a high-collared shirt, fastened a belt around my waist, and tucked a pistol into it. I looked like an Assyrian boy. She then brought a two-wheeled cart harnessed to a horse. My mother disliked the plan but feared opposing Maryam openly. She neither permitted nor forbade me to go; she could only say, “Take care of my son.” Maryam replied, “I will guard him as if he were my own.”
Maryam carried a rifle and pistol, with three belts of ammunition. About a kilometre outside Dilman we began to see bodies. They grew more numerous as we approached, until at the gates the cart wheels passed over them. Maryam told me to remain with the cart, but I tied the horse and ran after her.
Carpets, feather quilts, and other objects lay along the way. To remove one carpet I had to clear many bodies from it. The work was heavy and the stench overpowering. Rugs had been spread over the dead, and looters tied cloths around their noses. No one wanted carpets or mattresses entangled with bodies.
Many of the looters were Armenians. I watched a group break through a mud wall into a room filled with rare old rifles and pistols. After they emptied it, I went inside and found a pistol decorated with silver engraving. I tucked it into my belt.
When I returned, the cart was full of porcelain. The smell made me sick. Maryam saw my pistol and laughed: “That is an antique — what will you do with it?” I asked why so many people had been killed. She gave enormous figures for the population and the dead and said it was vengeance for the murder of Mar Shimun.
According to her account, the Jilu had pursued those who fled Kuhna Shahr to Dilman and killed adults, women, old people, and children. She described a walled city, Iranian forces positioning machine guns at the main gate, and an attack that forced the inhabitants to flee through that same gate and into the gunfire.2
Bodies lay along some two kilometres of road around Dilman. The stench threatened the health of people in nearby villages. Those who left the district with their prisoners did not pause to bury the dead, but merely covered them with earth.
- The original Aramaic is transcribed as “Hay Huydaa, ke lahha” — “Hey, Jew, come here.”
- This paragraph reports Maryam’s account as it was given to the author. The previous editor noted that the description of the fortified city and gate may in fact refer to Khoy, discussed in the following section. The diary testimony remains unchanged in the body; the uncertainty is recorded only here.