In 1894, the French diplomat Paul Cambon described the creation of Kurdish Hamidies regiments as "the official organization for pillage at the expense of Armenian Christians". In these places "the system of persecutions and extorsions became intolerable to populations who had become accustomed to their slavery". According to Cambon, the Porte refused reforms and persisted in "maintaining a veritable regime of terror, arrests, assassinations and rape.". In 1924 the Muslim Kurds around Sheik Said "rose in revolt against the "atheist government of Ankara" and demanded autonomy, the restoration of religious laws and of the sultanate". In 1932 Iraqi forces commanded by Kurdish general Bakr Sidki killed 600 Assyrians at Simel, near Mosul. Kurds committed the slaughter "in which 65 Nestorian villages in northern Iraq were plundered and burned down, priests were tortured and Christians were forced to renounce their religion while others in Dohuk were deported and about a 100 were shot". In 1843 Nestorians in the Tauris region refused to pay Kurds the jizya, and "by way of reprisal 4350 Nestroians were slaughtered, about 400 women and children were reduced to slavery and all their houses and churches destroyed". Historians have noted that in "Kurdistan Jews, Nestorians and Armenians were subject to tallage and corvees at whim of authorities".