British Diplomat and Spy Major Noel’s Report on the Extermination of Armenians and Assyrians in Diarbekir Province during the Armenian Genocide

Abstract

This publication presents the report by Major Edward William Noel, British diplomat and spy, regarding the extermination of Armenians and Assyrians in Diarbekır province during the Armenian Genocide. The document, entitled “Christian Massacres of 1915 in Diarbekir Vilayat,” has been compiled in April, 1919 in the city of Mardin, where the author was on a fact-finding mission, so most of the massacre cases presented there refer to the mentioned locality. Attached to Noel’s report, as an appendix, we present the letter of Arthur Calthorpe, British High Commissioner in Constantinople, to British Foreign Minister Lord George Curzon, dated July 2, 1919, in which he transmits Major Noel’s estimate of populations of Diarbekir vilayet before and after the First World War. Major Noel has been characterized by researchers as “an expert on Kurdistan and the Kurds”, and as “the main British agent in Kurdistan, both in Anatolia and in Iraq, from 1919 to 1922,” so these documents published in Armenian translation, as well as other papers related to his mission in 1919 are very remarkable from the point of view of studying the demography of the southern regions of Western Armenia, the course of the Armenian Genocide, as well as of the history of ArmenianKurdish, Armenian-Turkish, Turkish-Kurdish relationships after the First World War.