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Over 19,000 Syrian Kurds Deprived of Citizenship, 46,000 Remain Stateless

Kurdish members of the Self-Defense Forces stand near the Syrian-Turkish border in the Syrian city of al-Derbasiyah. Reuters file photo
Kurdish members of the Self-Defense Forces stand near the Syrian-Turkish border in the Syrian city of al-Derbasiyah. Reuters file photo
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Over 19,000 Syrian Kurds Deprived of Citizenship, 46,000 Remain Stateless

Kurdish members of the Self-Defense Forces stand near the Syrian-Turkish border in the Syrian city of al-Derbasiyah. Reuters file photo
Kurdish members of the Self-Defense Forces stand near the Syrian-Turkish border in the Syrian city of al-Derbasiyah. Reuters file photo

Syrians for Truth and Justice, a non-governmental group, has revealed that tens of thousands of Kurds are still deprived of Syrian citizenship.

The group’s remarks were supported by an extensive report published to commemorate the 56th anniversary on the “Exceptional Census”, in the city of Hasakah, northeast of Syria.

On August 23, 1963, Republican Legislative Decree No. 93 was issued ordering that a census be carried out in the northeast Hasakah governorate, home to the highest concentration of Kurds in Syria. That is why the census was called the “Exceptional Census”, also currently known as the “Hasakah Census 1962”.

This was based on ethnic discrimination against Kurdish rights in violation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

Syrians for Truth and Justice is an independent organization whose members include Syrian human rights defenders, advocates and academics of different backgrounds and nationalities.

A report titled “Lost Syrian Citizenship: How the 1962 census destroyed the lives and identity of the Syrian Kurds” will be published in Geneva on January 18 during the 39th session of the Human Rights Council.

Up until 2011, the number of persons categorized as foreign in Hasakah amounted to 346,242 registered individuals.

By the end of May 2018, 326,489 obtained Syrian citizenship, said Syrians for Truth and Justice Director Bassam Al-Ahmed.

Some 19,753 Kurds are still unable to gain citizenship, he added.

After the outbreak of the anti-regime uprising in 2011, which called for sweeping reforms in the country, the ruling Bashar Al-Assad regime issued Legislative Decree No. 49 on April 7 within the same year which stipulates granting citizenship to those registered as foreign nationals residing in Hasakah.

The issue of unregistered individuals peaked in Hasakah at the beginning of 2011, reaching more than 171,300 individuals, according to the report.

Some 50,400 stateless individuals were able to land citizenship after managing registration as foreigners first, Ahmed added.

However, he pointed to the fact that over 41,000 cases have not been corrected and are still deprived of citizenship.

“There are still 5,000 people who did not check in with local registry authorities to correct their legal status, and are likely to be outside the country,” he added.

In total, approximately 46,000 Syrian Kurds are unregistered and without any citizenship rights.

According to the organization's researchers, the census destroyed the lives of Kurdish citizens, and that successive Syrian governments have adopted ethnic and racial discrimination policies against them.

“We wanted to honestly convey the suffering of thousands of Kurds deprived of their most basic rights, where many of them are still deprived of citizenship and all their political, social and economic rights,” researchers added.

For decades, Kurds registered as foreign residents or remained stateless.

Among restrictions they faced was being denied the right to register marriages and births, to obtain passports and travel documents and the right to work in state institutions.

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Winter Is Hitting Gaza and Many Palestinians Have Little Protection from the Cold

Reda Abu Zarada, 50, displaced from Jabaliya in northern Gaza, warms up by a fire with her grandchildren at a camp in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024. (AP)
Reda Abu Zarada, 50, displaced from Jabaliya in northern Gaza, warms up by a fire with her grandchildren at a camp in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024. (AP)
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Winter Is Hitting Gaza and Many Palestinians Have Little Protection from the Cold

Reda Abu Zarada, 50, displaced from Jabaliya in northern Gaza, warms up by a fire with her grandchildren at a camp in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024. (AP)
Reda Abu Zarada, 50, displaced from Jabaliya in northern Gaza, warms up by a fire with her grandchildren at a camp in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024. (AP)

Winter is hitting the Gaza Strip and many of the nearly 2 million Palestinians displaced by the devastating 14-month war with Israel are struggling to protect themselves from the wind, cold and rain.

There is a shortage of blankets and warm clothing, little wood for fires, and the tents and patched-together tarps families are living in have grown increasingly threadbare after months of heavy use, according to aid workers and residents.

Shadia Aiyada, who was displaced from the southern city of Rafah to the coastal area of Muwasi, has only one blanket and a hot water bottle to keep her eight children from shivering inside their fragile tent.

“We get scared every time we learn from the weather forecast that rainy and windy days are coming up because our tents are lifted with the wind. We fear that strong windy weather would knock out our tents one day while we’re inside,” she said.

With nighttime temperatures that can drop into the 40s (the mid-to-high single digits Celsius), Aiyada fears that her kids will get sick without warm clothing.

When they fled their home, her children only had their summer clothes, she said. They have been forced to borrow some from relatives and friends to keep warm.

The United Nations warns of people living in precarious makeshift shelters that might not survive the winter. At least 945,000 people need winterization supplies, which have become prohibitively expensive in Gaza, the UN said in an update Tuesday. The UN also fears infectious disease, which spiked last winter, will climb again amid rising malnutrition.

The UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, known as UNRWA, has been planning all year for winter in Gaza, but the aid it was able to get into the territory is “not even close to being enough for people,” said Louise Wateridge, an agency spokeswoman.

UNRWA distributed 6,000 tents over the past four weeks in northern Gaza but was unable to get them to other parts of the Strip, including areas where there has been fighting. About 22,000 tents have been stuck in Jordan and 600,000 blankets and 33 truckloads of mattresses have been sitting in Egypt since the summer because the agency doesn’t have Israeli approval or a safe route to bring them into Gaza and because it had to prioritize desperately needed food aid, Wateridge said.

Many of the mattresses and blankets have since been looted or destroyed by the weather and rodents, she said.

The International Rescue Committee is struggling to bring in children’s winter clothing because there “are a lot of approvals to get from relevant authorities,” said Dionne Wong, the organization’s deputy director of programs for the occupied Palestinian territories.

“The ability for Palestinians to prepare for winter is essentially very limited,” Wong said.

The Israeli government agency responsible for coordinating aid shipments into Gaza said in a statement that Israel has worked for months with international organizations to prepare Gaza for the winter, including facilitating the shipment of heaters, warm clothing, tents and blankets into the territory.

More than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry's count doesn't distinguish between civilians and combatants, but it has said more than half of the fatalities are women and children. The Israeli military says it has killed more than 17,000 militants, without providing evidence.

The war was sparked by Hamas’ October 2023 attack on southern Israel, where the armed group killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostages in Gaza.

Negotiators say Israel and Hamas are inching toward a ceasefire deal, which would include a surge in aid into the territory.

For now, the winter clothing for sale in Gaza's markets is far too expensive for most people to afford, residents and aid workers said.

Reda Abu Zarada, 50, who was displaced from northern Gaza with her family, said the adults sleep with the children in their arms to keep them warm inside their tent.

“Rats walk on us at night because we don’t have doors and tents are torn. The blankets don’t keep us warm. We feel frost coming out from the ground. We wake up freezing in the morning,” she said. “I’m scared of waking up one day to find one of the children frozen to death.”

On Thursday night, she fought through knee pain exacerbated by cold weather to fry zucchini over a fire made of paper and cardboard scraps outside their tent. She hoped the small meal would warm the children before bed.

Omar Shabet, who is displaced from Gaza City and staying with his three children, feared that lighting a fire outside his tent would make his family a target for Israeli warplanes.

“We go inside our tents after sunset and don’t go out because it is very cold and it gets colder by midnight,” he said. “My 7-year-old daughter almost cries at night because of how cold she is.”