Arab Belt project

The Arab Belt (الحزام العربي, al-hizām al-ʿarabī; Kembera Erebî, که‌مبه‌را عه‌ره‌بی) was the Syrian Ba'athist government's project of Arabization of the north of the Al-Hasakah Governorate to change its ethnic composition of the population in favor of Arabs to the detriment of other ethnic groups, particularly Kurds.

It involved the seizure of land which was then settled with Arabs displaced by the creation of Lake Assad. The programme was implemented in 1973; forcibly deporting around 140,000 Kurds and confiscating their lands around a 180-mile strip. Thousands of Arab settlers coming from Raqqa were then granted these lands to establish settlements.

Background
Until the beginning of the 20th century, the Jazira province was a “no man’s land” primarily reserved for the grazing land of nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes Shammar and Tayy Arab tribes (see map drwan for Mark Sykes). During the late days of the Ottoman Empire, large Kurdish-speaking tribal groups both settled in and were deported to areas of northern Syria from Anatolia. The largest of these tribal groups was the powerful Reshwan tribe, which was initially based in Adıyaman Province but eventually also settled throughout Anatolia. Clans from another Anatolian tribe, the Milli confederation mentioned in 1518 onward, moved into the area. Danish writer C. Niebuhr who traveled to Arabia and Upper Mesopotanmia in 1764 recorded five nomadic Kurdish tribes (Dukurie, Kikie, Schechchanie, Mullie and Aschetie) and six Arab tribes (Tay, Kaab, Baggara, Geheish, Diabat and Sherabeh). in the area around Mardin. According to Niebuhr, the Kurdish tribes were settled near Mardin in Turkey, and paid the governor of that city for the right to graze their herds in the Syrian Jazira. The Kurdish tribes gradually settled in villages and cities and are still present in the modern governorate).



Since World War I
The demographics of northern Syria saw a huge shift in the early part of the 20th century when the Ottoman Empire (Turks) conducted ethnic cleansing of its Armenian and Assyrian Christian populations and some Kurdish tribes joined in the atrocities committed against them. Many Assyrians fled to Syria during the genocide and settled mainly in the Jazira area. During WWI and subsequent years, thousands of Assyrians fled their homes in Anatolia after massacres. After that, massive waves of Kurds fled their homes in Turkey due to conflict with Kemalist authorities and settled in Syria, where they were granted citizenship by the French Mandate authorities. The number of Kurds settled in the Jazira province during the 1920s was estimated at 20,000 people. Starting in 1926, the region witnessed another huge immigration wave of Kurds following the failure of the Sheikh Said rebellion against the Turkish authorities. Tens of thousands of Kurds fled their homes in Turkey and settled in Syria, and as usual, were granted citizenship by the French mandate authorities. This large influx of Kurds moved to Syria's Jazira province. It is estimated that 25,000 Kurds fled at this time to Syria. 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. The mandatory authorities continued to encourage Kurdish immigration into Syria, and by 1939, the villages numbered between 700 and 800. French authorities were not opposed to the streams of Assyrians, Armenians or Kurds who, for various reasons, had left their homes and had found refuge in Syria. 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. 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, French mandate authorities reported the following population numbers for the different ethnic and religious groups in al-Hasakah governorate.

The population of the governorate reached 155,643 in 1949, including about 60,000 Kurds. These continuous waves swelled the number of Kurds in the area who represented 37% of the Jazira population in a 1939 French authorities census. In 1953, French geographers Fevret and Gibert estimated that 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.

Censuses of 1943 and 1953
Among the Sunni Muslims, mostly Kurds and Arabs, there were about 1,500 Circassians in 1938.

As a result, to the Kurdish immigration to this area of Syria, the population of these areas became more heterogeneous. Moreover, irregular Kurds volunteered in the French mandate together with other ethnic or religious minorities, including Armenian and Kurdish irregulars

After WWII
The Syrian government believed that there was a new wave of Kurdish infiltrating into al-Hasakeh governorate in 1945. Syrian government documents indicate the immigrants "came singly and in groups from neighboring countries, especially Turkey, crossing illegally along the border from Ras al'Ain to al-Malikiyya. Gradually and illegally, they settled down in the region along the border in major population centers such as Dirbasiyya, Amuda and Malikiyya." As usual, many of these Kurds were able to register themselves illegally in the Syrian civil registers. They were also able to obtain Syrian identity cards through a variety of means, with the help of their relatives and members if their tribes. They did so with the intent of settling down and acquiring property, especially after the issue of the Agrarian Reform Law No. 161 during the period of Egyptian-Syrian unification in 1958–1961, a socialist measure aimed at setting a maximum limit on agricultural land ownership. Official figures available in 1961 showed that in a mere seven-year period, between 1954 and 1961, the population of al-Hasakah governorate had increased from 240,000 to 305,000, an increase of 27 per cent which could not possibly be explained merely by natural increase.

1962 Census
The government claimed that Kurds from Turkey were "illegally infiltrating" the Jezireh in order to "destroy its Arab character". On 23 August 1962, the government decreed (decree no. 93) an extraordinary census of al-Jazira Province. If a person was not able to produce a document that proved they lived in Syrian before 1940, they were deemed illegal immigrants, mainly from Turkey. As part of this census on the 5 October 1962, 120,000 Kurds in the province were deprived of their Syrian citizenship. The Syrian Government later admitted mistakes were made during the census, but didn't reinstate citizenry.

The census indicated the real population was probably closer to 340,000. Although these figures may have been exaggerated, they were credible given the actual circumstances. From being lawless and virtually empty prior to 1914, the Jazira had proved to be astonishingly fertile once order was imposed by the French mandate and farming undertaken by the largely Kurdish population.... A strong suspicion that many migrants were entering Syria was inevitable. In Turkey the rapid mechanisation of farming had created huge unemployment and massive labour migration from the 1950s onwards. The fertile but not yet cultivated lands of northern Jazira must have been a strong enticement and the affected frontier was too long feasibly to police it.

A decision was made by the Ba'athist government in 1965 to build the 350 km long and 10–15 km wide Arab belt along the Syria–Turkey border. The planned belt stretched from the Iraqi border in the east to Ras al-Ayn in the west.

Arab Settlements
After another coup within the Baath party, Hafez al-Assad emerged as the head of Ba'athist Syria in 1970. While the proposals in the Hilal report had officially been accepted by the Ba'athist government as early as 1965, it was Hafez al-Assad who ordered the implementation of the Arab Belt programme in 1973. The project's name was changed by the Assad government to "Plan to establish model state farms in the Jazira region". By the end of the programme, around 140,000 Kurds living in 332 villages were displaced from their homes by the Syrian government; and tens of thousands of Arabs - mostly from the Raqqa region- established settlements in the confiscated lands. The area of the project was a strip of land - almost 15 km in breadth - that extended over 375 km in length; across the north-eastern boundary-regions of Syria with Turkey and Iraq.

Fifteen state farms of the Pilot Project were built on lands expropriated by the in the barriya (which means wild area in Arabic ); a zone of pasture and dry culture. Most of its land belonged to members of the Hleissat, a formerly semi-nomadic Arab tribe that settled near Raqqa in the 1940s. Each state farm constituted a model village where farm labourers were paid and governed by a "council of production".

Villages were built into which were to be settled 4,000 Arab families coming from the land which was to be submerged following the completion of the Tabqa dam and the filling of Lake Assad. The Arabs were provided with weapons and divided between more than 50 so-called model farms in the Jazira Region and to the north of Raqqa. Twelve were built each around Qamishli and Al-Malakiyah and sixteen around Ras al Ayn. The Kurdish village names of the area were replaced by Arabic names not necessarily related to the traditions and history of the region. These Arabs are named as Maghmurin (مغمورين Maġmūrīn, which is affected by flooding). The campaign has eventually faded out under Hafez al Assad in 1976, but the deported Kurds were not allowed to return.