The Assyrians suffered greatly for this, and up to 750,000 were massacred during the Assyrian Genocide of World War I at the hands of the Ottoman Turks and their Kurdish and Arab allies, leading to an Assyrian war of independence. However, at the Treaty of Versailles, the Assyrian delegates were refused entrance; in 1933 the Assyrians suffered a further persecution when thousands were wiped out in the Simele Massacre by the Iraqi Army. This was in retaliation for assisting the British in the First World War, who occupied Iraq.