Who Lives in Northeastern Syria?

Northeastern Syria is not a monolith but a region of profound ethnic and religious diversity, home to a majority Kurdish population of 3.5-4 million people, as well as Arab, Syriac, Assyrian, Armenian, and Turkmen communities, and Muslims, Christians, and Yazidis.

The modern conflict here is deeply rooted in decades of state policy aimed at suppressing Kurdish identity, beginning with the pivotal 1962 Hasakah census that stripped thousands of Kurds of citizenship, categorizing them as “foreigners” or unregistered “Maktoumeen” with no rights.

This was followed in 1974 by the Baath Party’s “Arab Belt” project, a deliberate demographic engineering plan that confiscated a 170-mile strip of fertile Kurdish land along the Turkish border and redistributed it to Arab families relocated from other regions, with the explicit goal of emptying the area of its Kurdish inhabitants and altering its fundamental character.

Understanding this history of systematic erasure is crucial to comprehending the current battles in Kurdish-majorities cities in Syria like Kobani and Hasakah, which are not just military struggles but fights over land, identity, and the right to exist for the region’s diverse populations.