İdil is a district of Şırnak Province

Şırnak Province

The Şırnak Province is a Turkish province in southeastern Anatolia. It has a population of 430,109 . The population was 353,197 in 2000....

 of Turkey

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

. The predominant religion in the region is Islam

Islam

Islam . The most common are and .   : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...

, although it was once the home of many Anatolia

Anatolia

Anatolia is a geographic and historical term denoting the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of the Republic of Turkey...

n Assyrian/Syriac Christians, who are part of the Syriac Orthodox Church

Syriac Orthodox Church

The Syriac Orthodox Church; is an autocephalous Oriental Orthodox church based in the Eastern Mediterranean, with members spread throughout the world. The Syriac Orthodox Church claims to derive its origin from one of the first Christian communities, established in Antioch by the Apostle St....

 of Antioch

Antioch

Antioch on the Orontes was an ancient city on the eastern side of the Orontes River. It is near the modern city of Antakya, Turkey.Founded near the end of the 4th century BC by Seleucus I Nicator, one of Alexander the Great's generals, Antioch eventually rivaled Alexandria as the chief city of the...

 and who were speakers of the Syriac language

Syriac language

Syriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Having first appeared as a script in the 1st century AD after being spoken as an unwritten language for five centuries, Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from...

 an Aramaic dialect. Idil, part of Tur Abdin

Tur Abdin

Tur Abdin is a hilly region of south east Turkey incorporating the eastern half of Mardin Province, and Şırnak Province west of the Tigris, on the border with Syria. The name 'Tur Abdin' is from the Syriac language meaning 'mountain of the servants '. Tur Abdin is of great importance to Syriac...

, was one of the villages that fell victim to the Assyrian Genocide

Assyrian genocide

The Assyrian Genocide refers to the mass slaughter of the Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac population of the Ottoman Empire during the 1890s, the First World War, and the period of 1922-1925...

 or Seyfo (literally "the sword" in Syriac) from 1915-1917 (the final years of the Ottoman Empire

Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...

). After the Seyfo, many of Idil's (or Beth-Zabday's) surviving Christian population were involved in a diaspora

Diaspora

A diaspora is "the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland" or "people dispersed by whatever cause to more than one location", or "people settled far from their ancestral homelands".The word has come to refer to historical mass-dispersions of...

; like many of the other Assyrians, Aramaeans, and Armenians

Armenians

Armenian people or Armenians are a nation and ethnic group native to the Armenian Highland.The largest concentration is in Armenia having a nearly-homogeneous population with 97.9% or 3,145,354 being ethnic Armenian....

, they too fled to parts of the Middle East, Cyprus, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Canada, and the United States. Kefshenne

Kefshenne

Kefshenne , also known as Kayalı in Turkish, is a small importing village in the southeast of Turkey, in Şırnak Province, near Mardin Province....

is of its important villages.