The Kurds have become so accustomed to death and living again that every moment you look at their history, the smell of death and gunpowder will inevitably be part of their life, identity and present and future.
In 1916, about tens of thousands of people in Mahabad and the surrounding villages were massacred by Tsarist Russia in a cold and severe winter, so that the city smelled of death and stench for a long time due to the lack of collection and burial of their bodies.
At a time when, as always, the Shah’s government enjoyed killing the Kurds, no penman wrote about the genocide and the massacre, and no representative from Iran spoke about this bitter truth about the history of the Kurds.
The massacre that we have heard today thanks to the stories of the ancestors of the people of Mahabad.

105 years have passed since the tragedy of the massacre of the people of Mahabad and its suburbs by the forces of the Russian Tsarist army in the events of the First World War.

The presence of the Russians and the Ottoman Turks during the First World War in the Mahabad region was long and relatively long, but the time of this massacre in the city and suburbs by Russian forces, from Saturday, January 9, 1916 to Wednesday, February 21, 1916 for a total of forty It has been five days.

There is no doubt that the Ottoman Turks, under the pretext of “jihad” with the Russian infidels, played a key role in inciting the Kurds, and the Kurds, under the influence of Ottoman Ottoman propaganda, killed several Russian soldiers, a road construction engineering group on present-day Burhan Road (Mahabad Buchanan) have struck.

According to Basil Nikitin in the book “Iranians I Know”, it was only Sheikh Baba Saeed Barzanji – an ascetic on the outskirts of Mahabad – who was not deceived by the Ottoman propaganda and questioned their claim of jihad, declaring it un-Islamic. He paid the price by sacrificing his life and being executed by the Ottomans. To this day, many have tried to blame the Kurds themselves by writing and saying that the Kurds themselves forced the Russians to kill them, by saying that these few members of the Russian engineering group were killed.

 Of course, this is not a rational justification. The death toll of the Russian engineering group may have barely reached ten to fifteen, perhaps, but the revenge that the Russians took against each one of them killed a hundred innocent  people from everywhere. Such crimes are not defensible or justifiable under any name or title.

 Mahabad at that time, its population in the suburbs barely reached ten to twelve thousand people, such a massacre of them was definitely the killing of over fifty percent of the people and was on the scale of genocide (genocide). So far it has been related to the days of the Tsar and according to some Kurdish intellectuals, these crimes were committed on the orders of the Tsarist conservative and predatory generals.

 On page 18 of the treatise “Mullajami Cemetery in Mahabad”, Qader Fattahi Ghazi, Tabriz, states: “He found and buried the body.”

In the American edition of “Kurdistan Mishneri”, which was later forced to change its name to “Orient Mishneri”, number one, tenth year, January 1918 (February 1297 AH), the psychiatrist of Dr. L.O. Fasum, one of the Protestant missionaries living in Mahabad and one of the eyewitnesses of the story, wrote about this:

“… In an area just over a mile from the city, eight hundred people were shot in the head. It was ten to fifteen minutes of pain and heartbreak that I will never forget. But this was not the main and terrible tragedy. In our city (meaning Mahabad) more than a thousand people were massacred. To save bullets, the vast majority of their bodies were pierced with shovels and spears, and many women and girls were captured and raped in unspeakable forms of violence. “They took about 400 other women and girls with them, some for rape and some for sale.”

In Kurdistan Magazine No. 12, Year 7, September 1916 (September and October 1295 AH), pages 3 to 7, based on the report of “Miss Augusta Goodhart” (who was spoken by the people of Mahabad at that time in colloquial language – Miss Kotat Khanum). “The total death toll in the region is estimated at tens of thousands,” it said. Among the abducted Kurdish women, some were sold for one to five dollars in Tabriz! The death toll in the city of Mahabad was seven thousand six hundred and seventy (7670) people, most of whom were men. His Excellency Dr. L.A. “Fasum personally found one hundred and fifty bodies in khans.”

On page 46 of the book: Notes from Kurdistan, Sheikh Raouf Ziaei, Salahuddin Ayoubi Publications (Urmia), first edition, 1988, the number of people killed in this horrific massacre in the city, more than five thousand people, has been written and recorded.