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{{about|the Kurdish-majority regions of Syria|the AANES, often called Rojava|Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria|}}
{{about|the Kurdish-majority regions of Syria|the AANES, often called Rojava|Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria|}}


'''Syrian Kurdistan''' (also '''Western Kurdistan''' ({{lang-ku|Rojavayê Kurdistanê}} or simply Rojava)) is a term used by nationalist Kurds to depict Kurdish-inhabited areas in [[Syria]],<ref>{{Cite news|date=2014-01-22|title=Special Report: Amid Syria's violence, Kurds carve out autonomy|language=en|work=Reuters|url=https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-kurdistan-specialreport-idUSBREA0L17320140122|access-date=2020-07-28}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Radpey|first=Loqman|date=September 2016|title=Kurdish Regional Self-rule Administration in Syria: A new Model of Statehood and its Status in International Law Compared to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq|url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/japanese-journal-of-political-science/article/kurdish-regional-selfrule-administration-in-syria-a-new-model-of-statehood-and-its-status-in-international-law-compared-to-the-kurdistan-regional-government-krg-in-iraq/E27336DA905763412D42038E476BBE61/core-reader|journal=Japanese Journal of Political Science|language=en|volume=17|issue=3|pages=468–488|doi=10.1017/S1468109916000190|issn=1468-1099|via=}}</ref><ref>Pinar Dinc (2020) [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19448953.2020.1715669 The Kurdish Movement and the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria: An Alternative to the (Nation-)State Model?] Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 22:1, 47-67, DOI: 10.1080/19448953.2020.1715669</ref>These areas are located in three non-contiguous regions in the [[Aleppo Governorate|Aleppo]], [[Raqqa Governorate|Raqqa]], and [[Al-Hasakah Governorate]]s.<ref>https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/fikraforum/view/al-hawl-camp-a-potential-incubator-of-the-next-generation-of-extremism</ref> [[Kurds]] form the [[Ethnic groups of Syria|predominant ethnic group]].{{Citation needed|date=July 2020}} Apart from the [[Afrin Region]], most of which has been part of the [[Turkish occupation of northern Syria]] since early 2018, the majority of Syrian Kurdistan is under the jurisdiction of the [[Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria]] (AANES), which began in Syrian Kurdistan at the beginning of the [[Rojava conflict]] in 2012. Because of these origins, the Kurdish term for Syrian Kurdistan, ''Rojava'', has become a shorthand for the AANES (particularly in foreign media), even though the AANES has come to include regions that have never been considered part of Kurdistan.
'''Syrian Kurdistan''' (also '''Western Kurdistan''' ({{lang-ku|Rojavayê Kurdistanê}} or simply Rojava)) is the portion of [[Kurdistan]] in [[Syria]],<ref>https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/46172541.pdf</ref><ref>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-kurdistan-specialreport/special-report-amid-syrias-violence-kurds-carve-out-autonomy-idUSBREA0L17320140122</ref><ref>https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/japanese-journal-of-political-science/article/kurdish-regional-selfrule-administration-in-syria-a-new-model-of-statehood-and-its-status-in-international-law-compared-to-the-kurdistan-regional-government-krg-in-iraq/E27336DA905763412D42038E476BBE61/core-reader</ref> located in three non-contiguous regions in the [[Aleppo Governorate|Aleppo]], [[Raqqa Governorate|Raqqa]], and [[Al-Hasakah Governorate]]s.<ref>https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/fikraforum/view/al-hawl-camp-a-potential-incubator-of-the-next-generation-of-extremism</ref> [[Kurds]] form the [[Ethnic groups of Syria|predominant ethnic group]]. Apart from the [[Afrin Region]], most of which has been part of the [[Turkish occupation of northern Syria]] since early 2018, the majority of Syrian Kurdistan is under the jurisdiction of the [[Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria]] (AANES), which began in Syrian Kurdistan at the beginning of the [[Rojava conflict]] in 2012. Because of these origins, the Kurdish term for Syrian Kurdistan, ''Rojava'', has become a shorthand for the AANES (particularly in foreign media), even though the AANES has come to include regions that have never been considered part of Kurdistan.


Kurdistan also includes parts of southeastern [[Turkey]] ([[Turkish Kurdistan]]), northern [[Iraq]] ([[Iraqi Kurdistan]]) and northwestern [[Iran]] ([[Iranian Kurdistan]]).<ref name="Kurdish Awakening 2014">''Kurdish Awakening: Nation Building in a Fragmented Homeland'', (2014), by Ofra Bengio, University of Texas Press</ref>
Kurdistan also includes parts of southeastern [[Turkey]] ([[Northern Kurdistan]]), northern [[Iraq]] ([[Southern Kurdistan]]) and northwestern [[Iran]] ([[Eastern Kurdistan]]).<ref name="Kurdish Awakening 2014">''Kurdish Awakening: Nation Building in a Fragmented Homeland'', (2014), by Ofra Bengio, University of Texas Press</ref>


The term ''Syrian Kurdistan'' is often used in the context of [[Kurdish nationalism]], which makes it a controversial term among proponents of [[Syrian nationalism|Syrian]] and [[Arab nationalism]]. There is ambiguity about its geographical extent, and the term has different meanings depending on context.
The term ''Syrian Kurdistan'' is often used in the context of [[Kurdish nationalism]], which makes it a controversial term among proponents of [[Syrian nationalism|Syrian]] and [[Arab nationalism]]. There is ambiguity about its geographical extent, and the term has different meanings depending on context.

[[File:Treaty_of_Sèvres_1920.svg|thumb|Kurdistan as suggested by the Treaty of Sèvres was located north of the Syrian border]]

== Historical background ==
Historical Kurdistan during Ottoman times referred to parts of northeastern Iraq and southeastern Turkey. The [[Treaty of Sèvres]], which is usually used as the basis for the suggested Kurdistan state,<ref>https://www.britannica.com/event/Treaty-of-Sevres</ref> delineated the border north of the border with Syria and [[Mesopotamia]] (which was a roughly straight line between [[Jazirat ibn Umar]], [[Mardin]], [[Edessa]] (Urfa), [[Aintab]] and [[Adana]] (leaving all these towns within Syria)<ref>[http://sam.baskent.edu.tr/belge/Sevres_ENG.pdf TExt of the Treaty of Sevres]</ref> The treaty reads about proposed Kurdistan:
{{Quote|A Commission sitting at Constantinople and composed of three members appointed by the British, French and Italian Governments respectively shall draft within six months from the coming into force of the present Treaty a scheme of local autonomy for the predominantly Kurdish areas lying east of the Euphrates, south of the southern boundary of Armenia as it may be hereafter determined, and north of the frontier of Turkey with Syria and Mesopotamia ...}}

Contemporary accounts of Kurdistan divide it into three parts; [[Turkish Kurdistan]], [[Iranian Kurdistan]] and [[Iraqi Kurdistan]].<ref>Natali, 2005. [https://books.google.com/books?id=w1dtAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=kurdistan The Kurds and the State: Evolving National Identity in Iraq, Turkey and Iran]</ref>

== Kurdification of the area ==
Until the beginning of the 20th century, al-Hasakah Governorate (then called Jazira province) was a "no man's land" primarily reserved for the grazing land of nomadic and semi-sedentary tribes.<ref name="Algun">Algun, S., 2011. [https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/205821 Sectarianism in the Syrian Jazira: Community, land and violence in the memories of World War I and the French mandate (1915- 1939)]. Ph.D. Dissertation. Universiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands. Pages 18. Accessed on 8 December 2019.</ref> During [[World War I]] and subsequent years, thousands of [[Assyrian people|Assyrians]] fled their homes in Anatolia after [[massacres]]. After that, massive waves of Kurds fled their homes in the mountains of [[Turkey]]<ref name="Gibert and Févret" /> due to conflict with Kemalist authorities and settled in Syria, where they were granted citizenship by the [[French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon|French Mandate authorities]]<ref name="Chatty2010">{{cite book|author=[[Dawn Chatty]]|title=Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8OsgAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA230|year=2010|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-1-139-48693-4|pages=230–232}}</ref> and enjoyed considerable rights as the French Mandate authority encouraged minority autonomy as part of a [[divide and rule]] strategy and recruited heavily from the Kurds and other minority groups, such as [[Alawite]] and [[Druze]], for its local armed forces.<ref name=Yildiz25>{{cite book|last=Yildiz|first=Kerim|title=The Kurds in Syria : the forgotten people|url=https://archive.org/details/kurdssyriaforgot00yild|url-access=limited|year=2005|publisher=Pluto Press, in association with Kurdish Human Rights Project|location=London [etc.]|page=[https://archive.org/details/kurdssyriaforgot00yild/page/n29 25]|isbn=0745324991|edition=1. publ.}}</ref> The number of Kurds settled in the Jazira province during the 1920's was estimated at 20,000<ref name="The Refugee Problem">{{cite book|last=Simpson|first=John Hope|title=The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey |year=1939 |publisher=Oxford University Press|location=London|ASIN=B0006AOLOA|page=458|edition=First|url-access=registration|url=https://books.google.com/books/about/The_refugee_problem_report_of_a_survey.html?id=SxR8uwEACAAJ}}</ref> to 25,000 people.<ref name=McDowell>{{cite book|last=McDowell|first=David|title=A Modern History of the Kurds |year=2005|publisher=Tauris|location=London [u.a.]|isbn=1-85043-416-6|pages=469|edition=3. revised and upd. ed., repr.}}</ref> French Mandate authorities encouraged their immigration and granted them Syrian citizenship.<ref name=Kreyenbroek1>{{cite book|last=Kreyenbroek|first=Philip G.|title=The Kurds: A Contemporary Overview|year=1992|publisher=Routledge|location=London|isbn=0-415-07265-4|pages=[https://archive.org/details/kurds00pkre/page/147 147]|author2=Sperl, Stefan|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/kurds00pkre/page/147}}</ref> The French official reports show the existence of at most 45 Kurdish villages in Jazira prior to 1927. A new wave of refugees arrived in 1929.<ref name=tejel3 /> The mandatory authorities continued to encourage Kurdish immigration into Syria, and by 1939, the villages numbered between 700 and 800.<ref name=tejel3>{{cite book|last=Tejel|first=Jordi|title=Syria's Kurds: History, Politics and Society|year=2009 |publisher=Routledge|location=London|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5lh9AgAAQBAJ&pg=PT250|isbn=0-203-89211-9|page=144|}}</ref> These continuous waves swelled the number of Kurds in the area, and French geographers Fevret and Gibert<ref name="fevret">{{cite journal|last=Fevret|first=Maurice |author2=Gibert, André |year=1953|title=La Djezireh syrienne et son réveil économique |journal=Revue de géographie de Lyon|issue=28|pages=1–15|language=French|url=http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/geoca_0035-113x_1953_num_28_1_1294|accessdate=2012-03-29}}</ref> estimated that in 1953 out of the total 146,000 inhabitants of Jazira, agriculturalist Kurds made up 60,000 (41%), semi-sedentary and nomad Arabs 50,000 (34%), and a quarter of the population were Christians.<ref name=fevret />

The French authorities themselves generally organized the settlement of the refugees. One of the most important of these plans was carried out in Upper Jazira in northeastern Syria where the French built new towns and villages (such as Qamishli) were built with the intention of housing the refugees considered to be "friendly". This has encouraged the non-Turkish minorities that were under Turkish pressure to leave their ancestral homes and property, they could find refuge and rebuild their lives in relative safety in neighboring Syria.<ref name=Tachjian>Tachjian Vahé, [https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/expulsion-non-turkish-ethnic-and-religious-groups-turkey-syria-during-1920s-and-early-1930s The expulsion of non-Turkish ethnic and religious groups from Turkey to Syria during the 1920s and early 1930s], ''Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence'', [online], published on: 5 March, 2009, accessed 09/12/2019, ISSN 1961-9898</ref> Consequently, the border areas in al-Hasakah Governorate started to have a Kurdish majority, while Arabs remained the majority in river plains and elsewhere.

In 1939, [[Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon|French mandate]] authorities reported the following population numbers for the different ethnic and religious groups in al-Hasakah governorate.<ref>Algun, S., 2011. [https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/205821 Sectarianism in the Syrian Jazira: Community, land and violence in the memories of World War I and the French mandate (1915- 1939)]. Ph.D. Dissertation. Universiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands. Pages 11–12. Accessed on 8 December 2019.</ref>

{| class="wikitable sortable"
|+ Syrian census of 1939
|-
! District !! Arab !! Kurd !! Christian !! Armenian !! Yezidi !! Assyrian
|-
| [[Hasakah]] city centre || 7,133 || 360 || 5,700 || 500 || ||
|-
| [[Tell Tamer]] || || || || || || 8,767
|-
| [[Ras al-Ayn]] || 2,283 || 1,025 || 2,263 || || ||
|-
| [[Al-Shaddadah|Shaddadi]] || 2,610 || || 6 || || ||
|-
| [[Tell Brak]] || 4,509 || 905 || || 200 || ||
|-
| [[Qamishli]] city centre || 7,990 || 5,892 || 14,140 || 3,500 || 720 ||
|-
| [[Amuda]] || || 11,260 || 1,500 || || 720 ||
|-
| [[Al-Darbasiyah]] || 3,011 || 7,899 || 2,382 || || 425 ||
|-
| [[Chagar Bazar]] || 380 || 3,810 || 3 || || ||
|-
| Ain Diwar || || 3,608 || 900 || || ||
|-
| Derik (later renamed [[Al-Malikiyah]]) || 44 || 1,685 || 1,204 || || ||
|-
| Mustafiyya || 344 || 959 || 50 || || ||
|-
| Derouna Agha || 570 || 5,097 || 27 || || ||
|-
| Tel Koger (later renamed [[Al-Yaarubiyah]])|| 165 || || || || ||
|}

The population of the governorate reached 155,643 in 1949, including about 60,000 Kurds.<ref name="Gibert and Févret">La Djezireh syrienne et son réveil économique
André Gibert, Maurice Févret, 1953. [https://www.persee.fr/doc/geoca_0035-113x_1953_num_28_1_1294 La Djezireh syrienne et son réveil économique]. In: Revue de géographie de Lyon, vol. 28, n°1, 1953. pp. 1-15; doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/geoca.1953.1294 Accessed on 8 December 2019.</ref>


==References==
==References==

Revision as of 13:17, 28 July 2020

This article is about the Kurdish-majority regions of Syria. For the AANES, often called Rojava, see Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.

Syrian Kurdistan (also Western Kurdistan (Kurdish: Rojavayê Kurdistanê or simply Rojava)) is the portion of Kurdistan in Syria,[1][2][3] located in three non-contiguous regions in the Aleppo, Raqqa, and Al-Hasakah Governorates.[4] Kurds form the predominant ethnic group. Apart from the Afrin Region, most of which has been part of the Turkish occupation of northern Syria since early 2018, the majority of Syrian Kurdistan is under the jurisdiction of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), which began in Syrian Kurdistan at the beginning of the Rojava conflict in 2012. Because of these origins, the Kurdish term for Syrian Kurdistan, Rojava, has become a shorthand for the AANES (particularly in foreign media), even though the AANES has come to include regions that have never been considered part of Kurdistan.

Kurdistan also includes parts of southeastern Turkey (Northern Kurdistan), northern Iraq (Southern Kurdistan) and northwestern Iran (Eastern Kurdistan).[5]

The term Syrian Kurdistan is often used in the context of Kurdish nationalism, which makes it a controversial term among proponents of Syrian and Arab nationalism. There is ambiguity about its geographical extent, and the term has different meanings depending on context.

References

  1. ^ https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/46172541.pdf
  2. ^ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-kurdistan-specialreport/special-report-amid-syrias-violence-kurds-carve-out-autonomy-idUSBREA0L17320140122
  3. ^ https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/japanese-journal-of-political-science/article/kurdish-regional-selfrule-administration-in-syria-a-new-model-of-statehood-and-its-status-in-international-law-compared-to-the-kurdistan-regional-government-krg-in-iraq/E27336DA905763412D42038E476BBE61/core-reader
  4. ^ https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/fikraforum/view/al-hawl-camp-a-potential-incubator-of-the-next-generation-of-extremism
  5. ^ Kurdish Awakening: Nation Building in a Fragmented Homeland, (2014), by Ofra Bengio, University of Texas Press
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