Tell Tamer

Tell Tamer is a town on the east bank of the Khabur, 40 kilometres north-west of Hasakah. Assyrians who came from Iraq founded it at the end of the 1930s, and it became the centre of the 35-36 Assyrian villages strung along the river. There is no monument to tour here. This entry tells how the Jazira was resettled in the 20th century, and what happened in 2015.

What the name means

In Arabic and Aramaic it means “date hill”: tell or tella is a hill, tamr or tamra a date. The Kurdish name, Girê Xurma, means the same.

Where it is

The town lies on the left, or east, bank of the Khabur, just south of where the small Zirgan stream flows in. The basalt plateau of Ard al-Sheikh begins 3 kilometres to the east. Ras al-Ayn is 35 kilometres to the north-west, Hasakah 40 kilometres to the south-east. The M4 road from Aleppo to Mosul passes a junction here and crosses the river.

How the villages began

Assyrians fleeing the Simele massacre in Iraq in 1933 were settled under the French Mandate along a 25-kilometre strip of the Khabur, where they founded 35-36 villages. Tell Tamer itself was founded by Assyrians of the Upper Tiyari tribe. The tribal structure carried over into the new villages: the people of Tell Nasri, for example, come from the four tribes of the Valtu valley in Hakkari, in what is now south-eastern Turkey.

Villages on a 1994 list include Tell Nasri, Tell Hormiz, Tell Shamiram, Tell Baz, Tell Goran and Arbush. After the calendar split of 1965, Tell Hormiz became the seat of the rival bishop who kept the old calendar, while Tell Arbush is a Chaldean Catholic village. The town had 1244 inhabitants in 1936 and 7285 at the 2004 census.

The cover photograph dates from 1939: a bend of the Khabur in front, domed mud-brick houses on the far bank and the mound behind them.

What happened in 2015

On 23 February 2015 ISIL attacked the Assyrian villages of the Khabur and took 232 people hostage. In the weeks that followed, the village churches were blown up. The Church of the Virgin Mary in Tell Nasri, built with support from the diaspora and visible from far off, was destroyed in April 2015. The area was retaken in May 2015.

What is left today

In 2019 about 400 of Tell Tamer’s former 3000 Christians still lived there. By 2018, of the 10000 Assyrians who once lived across the Khabur villages, about 900 remained, and only one church held regular services.

Access today is not something this page can confirm. From 2019 the town lay close to a front line, and the administration of Hasakah province changed at the start of 2026. If you plan to go, ask in Hasakah first about the road and the state of the villages.

Don’t miss

The Assyrian Cathedral of the Virgin Mary in Hasakah. Families fleeing the villages gathered there in 2015. Tell Tamer and the cathedral are two ends of the same community, and each makes only half sense without the other.