Kurdish Nationalism - Syria

Syria

Under the French Mandate of Syria, the Kurds enjoyed considerable rights as the French mandate authority encourage minority independence movements as part of a divide and rule strategy and recruited a large Kurdish segment for its local armed forces. The repression of Kurdish civic rights escalated with the short-lived unification of Syria and Egypt as the United Arab Republic in 1958, partly in response to more vocal Kurdish demands for democracy, recognition as an ethnic group, and complaints that the state police and military academies were closed to Kurds. 120 000 Kurds (40% of the Syrian Kurd population) were stripped of their citizenship in the 1962 Census when the government claimed they were in fact Turks and Iraqis illegally residing in the country. Stripped of their nationality however, these now stateless Kurds still found themselves subject to its obligations through conscription in the military. The Kurdish language and cultural expressions were banned, a state that continues today. In 1962 the Government announced its “Arab Belt” plan (later renamed “plan for establishment of model state farms”) which would have forcibly expelled the Kurdish population from a 350 km long, 10 to 15 km deep strip of land along Syria’s northeast border and replaced them with Arab settlers but was never fully implemented. There was no change in policy under the new Ba’athist regime post-1963. It refused to implement its program of land reforms that was benefiting Arab peasants where Kurds would predominantly benefit until 1971. From the 1970s on there was relaxation of official treatment of Kurds but the late 1980s saw renewed widespread denial of Syrian citizenship status to domestic Kurds especially in refusing national identity documents such as passports.

Since the Syrian uprising Syrian government forces have abandoned many Kurdish-populated areas, leaving the Kurds to fill the power vacuum and govern these areas autonomously.

Many Kurds consider the Kurdish-majority regions of northern and northeastern Syria to be 'Western Kurdistan' (Kurdish: Kurdên rojava) and seek political autonomy within Syria (akin to Iraqi Kurdistan in Iraq) or outright independence as part of Kurdistan.