User:New Aramean/sandbox

Kurds are the largest people in the world without their own ethnic state. There is approximately 27 million Kurds are spread all over the world today, the vast majority live in the Middle East, especially in Turkey. Large Kurdish communities can also found in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Germany, and Sweden. The majority of the Kurds in Syria immigrated from Turkey during the 20th century, in order to escape the harsh repression of the Kurds in that country.

The Kurdish population in Syria is recent and intensified with and after the creation of the modern border between Syria and Turkey after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

When Maurice Abadie, a French general, was overseeing the French occupation of Syria, he made observations on the history of Kurdish settlement in Syria and the area to the west of the Euphrates in general:

"Over the course of the past century the Kurds have migrated and spread throughout northern Syria."

"Those who have spread to the west of the Euphrates have come from the valleys of Kurdistan. They have gradually settled in and live alongside the Turks, Turkmen, Christians and Arabs, all of whose customs they have adopted to some degree."

These first waves of Kurds were later joined in Syria by a new large group that drifted out of Turkey throughout the interwar period during which the Turkish campaign to assimilate its Kurdish population was at it highest. A third major wave came after WWII, many in hopes of getting land that was being distributed through the agricultural reform program in Syria.

Background
The border of the Kurdish-inhabited area has significantly shifted to the west during the 19th and 20th centuries. In the late 19th century the Ottoman Diyarbekir province, was an ethnically heterogeneous area. The province was split three-way, with Armenians dominating the northern part of the province, Arabs in the south and Kurds in the east with significant presence of all three communities throughout the province.

French mandate era
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 under the control of nomadic and semi-sedentary Shammar and Tayy Arab tribes. During World War I and subsequent years, thousands of Assyrians fled their homes in Anatolia after massacres and established towns such as Qamishli, Qubour Al-Bid (later renamed Al-Qahtaniya) and Al-Malikiyah. After that, massive waves of Kurds fled their homes in the mountains of Turkey due to conflict with Kemalist authorities and settled in Syria. A great flow of Turkish Kurds into Syria happened at this time. The number of Kurds settled in the Jazira province during the 1920s was estimated at 20,000 to 25,000 people. These numbers made a huge demographic shift in the Jazira population that was estimated at 40,000 in 1929.

The French Mandate authorities encouraged this Kurdish immigration and granted them considerable rights, including Syrian citizenship, in its bigger minority autonomy campaign as part of a divide and rule strategy. The French recruited heavily from the Kurds and other minority groups, such as Alawite and Druze, for its local armed forces. 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. These continuous waves swelled the number of Kurds in the area, and French geographers Fevret and Gibert 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. Consequently, the border areas in al-Hasakah Governorate between Qamishli and al-Malikiyah started to have a Kurdish majority, while Arabs remained the majority in river plains and elsewhere. Some of the new arrivals worked with the French against the local population. A prime example is the Kurdish tribal chief Hadjo Agha of the influential Havergan tribe who immigrated from Turkey together with more than 600 families, including arms and sheep, and settled in al-Qahtaniyah.

Due to the successive waves of immigration, especially those of Kurds from Turkey, the population of northeastern Syria has seen several big, unnatural jumps (as shown in the table). For example, the Jazira population jumped by 42.7% between 1931 and 1932. Likewise, the population jumped by 45.8% between 1933 and 1935. Another very significant jump happened in 1953 when the population swelled by 30.8% compared to the year before.

The French geographer Robert Montagne summarized the situation in 1932 as follows: "We are seeing an increase in village establishment that are either constructed by the Kurds descending from the Anatolian mountains (north of the border) to cultivate or as a sign of increasing settlement of Arab groups with the help of their Armenian and Yezidi farmers."

In 1939, French mandate authorities reported the following population numbers for the different ethnic and religious groups in al-Hasakah city centre.

After WWII
Illegal immigration along the border from Ras al'Ain to al-Malikiyya continued after WWII. Illegal Kurdish immigrants settled down in the region along the border in major population centers such as Al-Darbasiyah, Amuda and al-Malikiyya. 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 of their tribes. It is thought that the land reform encouraged their immigration in an effort to benefit from socialist-style land redistribution. 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% which could not possibly be explained merely by natural increase. The government was sufficiently worried by the apparent influx that it carried out a sample census in June 1962 which indicated the real population was probably closer to 340,000. The huge unemployment due to mechanization, harsh working conditions and political instability in Turkey are all factors that have further encouraged immigration out of Turkey. :

Immigration to northwestern Syria
Although mostly concentrated in the northeast due to the proximity of Kurdistan, Kurds immigrated to other parts of Syria. For example, a group of Kurdish Alevis who fled the persecution of the Turkish Army during the Dersim Massacre, settled in Mabeta in the 1930s.

Political influence of Turkish Kurds in Syria
The Kurdish immigration from Turkey has provided most of the Kurdish leaders in Syria, notably the Badr Khan family, Dr. Ahmad Nazif, and Hassan Hajo Agha.