In the period prior to the establishment of Abbasid rule in AD 750 , many pastoral Kurds moved into upper Mesopotamia , taking advantage of an unstable situation . Cities in northern and northeastern ancient Assyria were raided and attacked by the Kurds of Persian Azerbaijan , " who killed , looted , and enslaved the indigenous population " , and the Kurds were moving into various regions in east of ancient Assyria . When the Seljuks invaded Mesopotamia , they recruited the Kurds for their campaigns . The invading Seljuks and Kurds " destroyed whatever they encountered " and enslaved women . The Seljuks rewarded the Kurds for their support with land , and the Seljuk leader Sinjur renamed the region called Kirmanshah in Persia as Kurdistan . Mosul , historically a Christian city , was repeatedly attacked . The historian Ibn Khaldun wrote that ' the Kurds spoiled and spread horror everywhere ' . The historian Al Makrezi , referring to the situation that emerged after the Kurdish settlement in al Jazirah , wrote that " they were able to establish Kurdish centres as their shares for helping the Turkish race in their conquest " . In time , Armenia and Assyria became " Kurdistan " . Afterwards happened the raids of Timur Lang , " whom the Kurds loyally followed and who enabled them to occupy the land of the Armenians , who were forcibly expelled " . Timur Lang rewarded the Kurds by " settling them in the devastated regions , which until then had been inhabited by the followers of the Church of the East . " The Ottoman Turks carried out a series of violent massacres of ethnic Assyrian and Armenian Christians in the 1870s , these killings , which resulted in over ten thousand deaths , were known as the Hamidian massacre . The settlement of the Persian Kurds along the eastern border was the first powerful action in changing the demographics of the Assyrian homeland . The Kurds remained loyal to the Ottomans as long as they were enjoying power and greatness . The Ottoman Turks conducted a large-scale genocide and ethnic cleansing of the ancient and indigenous , Greek , Armenian , Assyrian and Maronite Christian inhabitants of Anatolia , north western Iran , the fringes of northern Iraq and northern Syria and Mount Lebanon during and immediately after World War I , resulting in well over 3 million deaths among the 6 million Christians who were living in the Ottoman Empire in 1914 of 26 million inhabitants and large-scale deportations in the Armenian Genocide , Assyrian Genocide , Greek Genocide and Great famine of Mount Lebanon
Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide
Christianity in the Middle East