August 7 marked Martyrs Day, when Assyrian Christians worldwide reflected on the huge loss of life during World War I when the Ottoman Turks massacred hundreds of thousands of Assyrians. This genocide forced survivors to flee their millennia-old villages in southern and eastern Turkey and resettle in neighbouring Iraq, Iran and Syria. The events of World War I are touched on briefly in Run Thomas Run, by Kate Carty, which centres on an Assyrian family in the 1990s and 2000s. As they wait to hear news of a missing family member in Iraq, the teenage Ramina’s grandmother recalls her own mother’s escape as a child from the Ottoman purges in 1915.
