The Armenian toponym of the city and the kaza of the same name is Chernik or Bsherik, the Kurdish name Kobin, also called Almedina by Syriacs. The history of settlement goes back to Churritic tribes. Around 1200 B.C. the area came under Assyrian rule.
According to the census of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, there were 5,038 Armenians in 40 villages of the kaza Beşiri before the First World War. They were Kurdophone and maintained 15 churches and 14 schools with 700 students.(1)
David Gaunt describes Beşiri as a “Syriac Orthodox exclave east of Diyarbekir”, where 200 Syriacs lived in the administrative center and 4,690 more Syriacs in 27 surrounding villages, “plus 2,000 in 15 villages in nearby Bafaya nahiya.”[2]
The vast majority of Armenians living in the region were massacred in May 1915 by the Kurdish tribes of Belek, Bekran and Shegro (Trk.: Şegro).
„The 110 Kurdish-speaking Armenian villages of the rural kazas of Beşiri and Silvan (…) lay on the eastern border of the vilayet of Dyarbekir, just south of Sasun. The location of these villages may explain why they were attacked very early. As we noticed when discussing the operations out in the sancak of Mush, the authorities appealed in May to the Kurdish Belek, Bekran, Şegro, and other tribes to attack not only Sasun but also the civilian population of the kazas of Silvan and Beşiri. While many fell victim to the massacres that the Kurds staged in these villages, several thousand Armenians from the area managed to flee to Sasun, where in August they met the same fate as its town population.
Among Dr. Reşid’s many victims was the kaymakam of Beşiri, Naci Bey, a native of Baghdad; (…) he was assassinated on the vali’s orders, and was not replaced by Rasım Bey until 20 June 1915, after the district has been cleansed of its Armenian population (…).”
Excerpted from: Kévorkian, Raymond: The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History. London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011, p. 367f.
In an estimate presented at the Paris Peace Conference (1919), the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate put the number of massacred Syriac Orthodox Christians in the kaza Beşiri at 4,481 and the number of destroyed villages at 30.[3]