The Arab Belt (; ) was a project undertaken by Ba'athist Syria, which aimed to Arabize the northern areas of the Al-Hasakah Governorate, to the detriment of other ethnic groups, particularly the Kurds.
It primarily involved the expulsion of Kurds from public land used as pasture, and the settlement of Arabs, in their place. The program was implemented in 1973; deporting around 140,000 Kurds and confiscating their lands around a 180-mile strip. Thousands of Arabs—around 4,000 families who were displaced by the creation of Euphrates Lake in Raqqa—were then granted these lands to establish settlements.
Background
During Ottoman rule in 1517–1917, the interior of Upper Mesopotamia (lands south of the Baghdad–Berlin railway line, east of the Euphrates, and west of the Tigris) was a "no man's land", incorporated de jure under the Mosul, Aleppo, and Diyarbekir Ottoman vilayets as well as the Deir Ez-Zor Sanjak.https://journals.openedition.org/remmm/21593
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Primarily, the region was inhabited by the semi-nomadic Arab tribes of Shammar and Tayy (see 1907 map below).Algun, S., 2011. 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. However, the northern and eastern fringes, near Mosul and Mardin, were populated by Syriac-speaking Aramean and Assyrian Christians as well as Muslim Arab Bedouins of the aforementioned Arab tribes. As John G. Taylor states in 1866: "The northern part of Mesopotamia, in which Nisibin is situated, is peopled by Arabs and Turcomans". Taylor counts the Arabs as a total of 81,000 (souls) in 13500 households (tents). As for the Turcomans, who he comments "are erroneously called Kurds", their population is detailed as 1600 tents mostly centered around Veyranshehr. He also provided a table illustrating the ratio of Arabs to Kurds as 2.3:1, see below.
During the 19th century, however, large Kurdish-speaking tribal groups both settled in and were deported to areas of northern Syria from eastern Anatolia and the northwestern areas of the Zagros. The largest of these tribal groups was the powerful Reshwan tribe, which was initially based in Adıyaman Province. Clans from another Anatolian tribe, the Milli confederation mentioned in 1518 onward, moved into the area.
Upon the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the Jazirah was divided into three parts, between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. All three new nation-states left the region as a hinterland with little to no government attention or subsidies; even in the 21st century literacy rates and household income exhibit a stark difference between those regions and other regions.
In the 1920s, the number of Kurds in the Syrian Jazirah was estimated from 20,000 to 25,000 people, out of 100,000 inhabitants. In 1927, there were exactly 47 Kurdish-majority villages and towns. By 1929, following Kurdish expulsion from Turkey under Kemalist policies and the failure of the Sheikh Said rebellion (1925) and the Ararat rebellion (1927–1930), these now numbered over 800. Some Kurdish Alevis, fleeing the persecution of the Turkish army during the Dersim massacre, also settled in Afrin and Mabeta in the 1930s. This was all directly supported by the French High Commissioner of the Levant through the Terrier Plan in order to increase the profits of the area as well as to "divide and conquer".
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.
Thus, due to Ottoman policies and a general trend of sedentary urbanisation of nomadic peoples, 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 conducted ethnic cleansing of its Armenian and Assyrian Christian populations and some Kurdish tribes joined in the atrocities committed against them.Lazar, David William, not dated A brief history of the plight of the Christian Assyrians* in modern-day Iraq . American Mespopotamian. 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 as part of the Terrier Plan aiming at creating a Kurdish belt along the Turkish border.Harriet Montgomery, The Kurds of Syria: An Existence Denied (Berlin: Deutsches Orient-Institut, 2005), pp. 47–50. The first wave of Kurds settled in the Jazira province during around 1925 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.Abu Fakhr, Saqr, 2013. As-Safir daily Newspaper, Beirut. in Arabic Christian Decline in the Middle East: A Historical View 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.Tachjian Vahé, 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 Consequently, the border areas in al-Hasakah Governorate started to have a Kurdish majority, while Arabs remained the majority in river plains and elsewhere.La Djezireh syrienne et son réveil économique. André Gibert, Maurice Févret, 1953. 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.
In 1939, French mandate authorities reported the following population numbers for the different ethnic and religious groups in al-Hasakah governorate.Algun, S., 2011. 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.
District Arab Kurd Christian Armenian Yezidi Assyrian Hasakah city centre 7133 360 5700 500 Tel Tamer 8767 Ras al-Ayn 2283 1025 2263 Shaddadi 2610 6 Tel Brak 4509 905 200 Qamishli city centre 7990 5892 14,140 3500 720 Amuda 11,260 1500 720 Derbasiyeh 3011 7899 2382 425 Shager Bazar 380 3810 3 Ain Diwar 3608 900 Derik (later renamed al-Malikiyah) 44 1685 1204 Mustafiyya 344 959 50 Derouna Agha 570 5097 27 Tel Koger (later renamed Al-Yaarubiyah) 165
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 Al-Hasakah province population in a 1939 French authorities census. In 1953, French geographers Fevret and Gibert estimated that out of the total 146,000 inhabitants of this area, 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 + Syrian censuses of 1943 and 1953 in Al-Jazira province (today's Al-Hasakah governorate)Religious group Population(1943) Percentage(1943) Population(1953) Percentage(1953) Muslims Sunni Muslims 99,665 68.26% 171,058 73.70% Other Muslims 437 0.30% 503 0.22% Christians Syriac Orthodox & Syriac Catholic 31,764 21.76% 42,626 18.37% Armenians 9,788 6.70% 12,535 5.40% Other churches 944 0.65% 1,283 0.55% Total Christians 42,496 29.11% 56,444 24.32% Jews 1,938 1.33% 2,350 1.01% Yazidis 1,475 1.01% 1,749 0.75% TOTAL Al-Jazira province 146,001 100.0% 232,104 100.0%
Among the Sunni Muslims, mostly Kurds and Arabs, there were about 1,500 Circassians in 1938.M. Proux, "Les Tcherkesses", La France méditerranéenne et africaine, IV, 1938
As a result, to the Kurdish immigration to this area of Syria, the population of these areas became more heterogeneous.Kaya, Z. 2012. Kaya (2012). Moreover, irregular Kurds volunteered in the French mandate together with other ethnic or religious minorities, including Armenian and Kurdish irregularsFieldhouse, D. K., 'Syria and the French, 1918–1946', Western Imperialism in the Middle East 1914-1958 (Oxford, 2008; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Jan. 2010), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199540839.003.0007
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.McDowall, David. Modern History of the Kurds, I. B. Tauris & Company, Limited, 2004. pp. 473-474.
1962 Census