هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
The integration process between the Syrian government and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) continues to affect daily life in Hasakah province. Brief periods of calm on the ground give way to renewed tensions, which take different forms and arise for different reasons. Behind this complex situation are unresolved problems that have simmered for decades. Several parties are now exploiting them to inflame ethnic tensions between Arabs and Kurds in the province.
These tensions intensified during the Syrian revolution, with both the ousted Assad regime and the SDF contributing to them. Among the most prominent disputes are those surrounding the “Arab Belt” and the “submerged people”, which Kurdish parties continue to invoke to sustain their political and media narratives. Some racist Kurdish rhetoric has gone so far as to call for the expulsion of Arabs resettled in these areas, branding them “settlers” and “outsiders”.
The origins of the Arab Belt dispute and Hilal’s recommendations
The “Arab Belt” became a central term in Kurdish party narratives. For decades, it was used to symbolise what is described as a “project of forced Arabization and settler occupation” intended to remove Kurds from Hasakah’s border strip and replace them with Arabs.
Yet an examination of the historical origins of this narrative, and the circumstances and developments of the period, reveals a vast gap between Kurdish party propaganda and what happened on the ground. It exposes the claim of “ethnic cleansing and population replacement” as a political myth, exploited to fuel separatist tendencies and reinforce a sense of historical victimhood. This narrative ignores the origins of the issue: a Syrian government project to address the consequences of building the Euphrates Dam.
To understand how the “Arab Belt” dispute emerged, it is necessary to return to the early 1960s. In 1962, towards the end of the secession period, President Khalid al-Azm’s government decided to conduct what was called the “exceptional census” in Hasakah province, alongside the launch of a development programme known as “Jazira Reform”.
The programme’s stated aim was to narrow the stark gap in development and urban conditions between remote parts of the Syrian Jazira and Syria’s major inland cities. The region had begun to acquire greater strategic importance following the discovery of oil in Hasakah fields such as Rmeilan and Karatchok.
Security concerns also weighed heavily on the Syrian government. Officials were anxious about continued Kurdish migration from Turkey following the conflicts and political developments the country had experienced since the 1920s.
This prompted fears within Syrian state institutions of a sudden demographic imbalance along Hasakah’s border strip. Saeed al-Sayyid, then governor of Hasakah, and Major General Aziz Abdel Karim, the interior minister, drew up security and administrative proposals to regulate movement across the border and restrict property ownership to Syrian citizens.
Against this tense backdrop, Muhammad Talab Hilal, then a first lieutenant in Political Security, produced a personal study in 1963. It contained radical proposals for Arabisation and extreme recommendations to expel Kurds, settle Arabs in their place and deny non-Arabs privileges and rights.
Hilal proposed removing all Kurds from the border strip and settling Arabs from the Shammar tribe in their place. The study was never implemented, but the significance of its proposals was subsequently and deliberately inflated, a practice that continues today. Kurdish party literature greatly exaggerated their importance, making them appear to be the “constitution and sunna” governing Syrian state policy towards the Kurds.
In reality, Syria’s political leadership never approved or adopted the study. The Baath Party’s Regional Congress rejected it in September 1963. The congress leadership also refused to put Hilal’s paper on the agenda, excluding it entirely because it was unrealistic and contradicted the party’s principles and its social and agrarian vision.
By contrast, the Baath Party’s left wing at the time regarded the Kurds of the Jazira as poor peasants with the same rights and duties as Arab and Assyrian peasants. Decisions issued in April 1963 affirmed that all peasants in Hasakah could remain on the land they occupied and recognised their possession of it, without discrimination on grounds of ethnicity or language. Everyone benefited from the Baath Party’s agrarian reform decisions.
The Euphrates Dam and the origins of the submerged people’s plight
Today, the term “Arab Belt” distorts the project’s history in Kurdish nationalist propaganda. The project was directly linked to one of the largest undertakings in modern Syrian history: the construction of the “Euphrates Dam” and the creation of “Lake Assad” behind it. This is far removed from the narrative that portrays it as a settlement plan to expel Kurds or an implementation of Muhammad Talab Hilal’s recommendations.
The story began in the Tabqa area of Raqqa province in 1966, after Syria and the Soviet Union signed a bilateral agreement to build a storage dam on the Euphrates River. Work began in late 1968 and proceeded in several stages until completion. The dam required the creation of a vast lake behind it. Named “Lake Assad”, it was between 80 and 82 kilometres long and between eight and 12 kilometres wide, covering about 650 square kilometres.
When the state diverted the river and began filling the reservoir between 1973 and 1975, at an elevation of 300 metres above sea level, the water submerged more than 60,000 hectares of some of the finest agricultural land. It also covered thousands of hectares of pasture and built-up land, along with more than 250 villages, farms and settlements in rural Raqqa and Aleppo.
The flooding displaced tens of thousands of people from their land, most of them members of the Walda clan, a branch of the Boushaaban tribe. They later became known as the “Ghamr farmers” or the “submerged people”.
A census of those affected by the flooding put their number at between 57,000 and 100,000 people, or about 9,749 families. These families were left without homes or land, placing a heavy responsibility on the Syrian government to resettle them.
The initial plan was to resettle them in new land reclamation projects in the Euphrates basin, the Maskanah farms in rural Aleppo and the so-called “pilot project” in Raqqa. These projects, however, had extremely limited capacity, and their completion was delayed for several years.
The Euphrates Basin Institution also distributed some reclaimed land to its own employees, leaving displaced residents deeply disappointed and facing harsh conditions. Some rejected and resisted the relocation decisions. They were forced to move their villages to higher ground beside the lake or relocate to Raqqa city and the Badia, and remain without compensation to this day.
The late Syrian writer Abdul Salam al-Ujayli documented this forgotten human tragedy in his well-known novel “The Submerged”, recording the suffering of the Ghamr Arabs in detail.
In March 1974, the Syrian government decided to transfer some of the affected farmers to Hasakah province and compensate them with state-owned land classified as surplus under the agrarian reform law. It threatened to deny compensation to anyone who refused to move and forcibly transferred their civil records to Hasakah.
These government measures caused prolonged suffering. The displaced farmers also became a convenient target for Kurdish parties, which exploited their presence to entrench a sense of victimhood and fabricate a hostile stereotype of them as “settlers” and “occupiers”. The parties claimed that the authorities had used the newcomers to seize Kurdish peasants’ land and redistribute it to them. This prompted growing calls for their expulsion, which continue today.
Assessing the Arab Belt
Kurdish parties repeatedly claim in their political propaganda that the “Arab Belt” project led to the expulsion of Kurdish residents and the confiscation of their land. The claim appears in many parties’ statements, yet the facts on the ground indicate that all Syrian Kurds remained in their villages and that no Kurdish village was demolished or evacuated to accommodate the submerged people.
The land the state distributed to them was officially registered as “state property”. It was either vacant, subject to agrarian reform laws or classified as surplus under agrarian reform decisions, which affected Arab landowners before Kurdish ones. Kurdish peasants stripped of citizenship under the 1962 census, known as “Turkish foreigners”, retained their land and holdings without confiscation.
The number of submerged people also shows that they were a minority in Hasakah. Only 4,453 families, comprising between 24,000 and 25,000 people, were transferred to the province for resettlement. They represented about 25 per cent of all those affected by the flooding and no more than 5.6 per cent of the province’s population in 1974. It is almost absurd to claim that such a small number could have brought about demographic change in a province such as Hasakah.
The Syrian government resettled these displaced people along a 300-kilometre stretch of the Turkish border, in a strip between 10 and 15 kilometres deep. It ran from the point where the Syrian, Iraqi and Turkish borders meet at al-Malikiyah in the east to Ras al-Ain in the west. Forty-one villages were built, between six and 15 kilometres apart, on an estimated 68,708 hectares of state land.
Of these, 12 were in the al-Malikiyah area, along the Tigris River to al-Qahtaniyah; 12 were in the Qamishli area, from al-Qahtaniyah to west of Amuda; and 17 were in the Ras al-Ain area, from Darbasiyah to the boundary with Raqqa province in the west.
Hasakah has 1,717 villages in total, of which the 41 villages of the submerged people account for just 2.4 per cent. Their number is also equivalent to about 3.5 per cent of the province’s 1,161 Arab villages and about nine per cent of its 453 Kurdish villages.
Some Kurdish village names also underwent “formal” Arabisation. Their earlier names remain in use, however, with Arab and Kurdish residents alike continuing to use the familiar historical names. The so-called “Arab Belt” therefore had a limited effect on the Jazira’s ethnic composition.
The submerged people today
Kurdish migration into Syria posed a major dilemma for successive governments after the establishment of the current Syrian state. Their response was often chaotic. Instability in Turkey created multiple problems and drove successive waves of migration, primarily to Hasakah.
Proposals to address this dilemma predated Muhammad Talab Hilal’s study. One of the most prominent came from Muhammad Kurd Ali, then Syria’s education minister and himself of Kurdish origin. After visiting the Syrian Jazira in 1931, he submitted a report to Prime Minister Taj al-Din al-Hasani warning of the dangers that migration from Turkey into the region posed to Syria’s security.
He wrote in his report: “The bulk of the migrants are in fact Kurds who have crossed the border,” and proposed “settling them in places far from the borders of Kurdistan, so that their presence may not, in the near or distant future, create political problems leading to the severing of the Jazira, or most of it, from the body of the Syrian state; for if the Kurds are unable today to form their own state, time may yet grant them their demands if they continue to speak insistently of their rights and extol their “nationalism”
Kurd Ali also noted “that the migrants settle on the banks of the Tigris, the Khabur, and the Jaghjagh, Balikh, and Euphrates rivers, and carve out from the shores of those rivers whatever areas they please; and it is not unlikely that a day will come when they will own those banks, even though most of them belong to the state.”
Kurdish migration continued until the 1990s, with the emergence of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Following the fall of the Assad regime and the beginning of a new era in Syria, interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa issued Decree No. 13 of 2026, granting Syrian citizenship and the right to citizenship to Kurds residing in Syria.
As integration between the government and the SDF proceeds, with a degree of power-sharing in Hasakah’s administration, some Kurdish parties and their supporters have begun calling for the expulsion of the “Ghamr Arabs” from their land. Describing them as “settlers”, they draw on the same myth of the “Arab Belt”.
These calls ignore the circumstances of their resettlement: they were displaced by the construction of the “Euphrates Dam” and resettled on Syrian state-owned land, while Kurdish villages and their residents remained in place. Several Kurdish villages have recently issued statements demanding the expulsion of the “Ghamr Arabs”, including Rubaria, in the countryside around al-Malikiyah/Derik. Residents of Ali Faro, in rural Qamishli, have also issued such a statement.
Following these tensions, Hasakah Deputy Governor Ahmad al-Hilali met notables from the Ghamr Arabs to discuss problems concerning several farmers ploughing their land, as well as attempts by Kurdish groups from neighbouring villages to stop them. Al-Hilali stressed his rejection of any conduct that could undermine security and civil peace. The Internal Security Directorate emphasised its role in protecting public and private property and maintaining stability.
The “Arab Belt” dispute has become a political tool for Kurdish parties in their dispute with the Syrian government. It has also become a flashpoint that could trigger an eruption of tensions in an already fragile Hasakah. The province remains unsettled, and the integration process continues to face difficulties.
Sources:
- Population distribution in Syria’s Hasakah province, Qamishli: National Gathering of Arab Youth, 2012 — a field study.
- Muhammad Talab Hilal, A study of al-Jazira province from national, social, and political perspectives.
- Muhammad Jamal Barout, The modern historical formation of the Syrian Jazira, Doha: Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, 2013.
- Qalamoun magazine, The journey of the submerged: The trilogy of political ambition, erasure of identity, and the tragedy of estrangement, a social statistical study by researcher Hassan Abdullah al-Khalaf, issues 19 and 20, July 2022.
- Muhammad Kurd Ali, Memoirs.
- Abdul Salam al-Ujayli, the novel “The Submerged.”