63rd Anniversary of the Exceptional Census that Stripped Kurds of Syrian Citizenship

ARK News.. Today, Sunday, October 5, 2025, marks the 63rd anniversary of the "Exceptional Census" of October 5, 1962, which stripped more than 300,000 Kurds in Syria’s Jazira region of their Syrian citizenship, according to Amnesty International’s 2011 report.

Following the Ba’ath Party’s seizure of power in 1963, successive Syrian governments pursued policies of Arabization, including changing Kurdish place names, banning Kurdish cultural expression, prohibiting Kurdish names for newborns, and implementing the “Arab Belt” project under Law No. 75 of 1964, which declared Hasaka a “border province.” Kurdish farmers were banned from owning agricultural land, reducing them to tenants on their own properties through annual leasing contracts with the Ministry of Agriculture.

The exceptional census, carried out under President Nazim al-Qudsi and Prime Minister Basheer al-Azma, divided Syria’s Kurds into three categories:

Full Syrian citizens.

Kurds stripped of citizenship, registered as “foreigners.”

Kurds deprived of nationality and unrecorded in civil registries, labeled “Maktoumeen” (“unregistered”).

This classification also extended to children born to mixed-status parents—such as an “unregistered” mother and a foreign father—further perpetuating statelessness across generations.

As a result of this discriminatory measure, hundreds of thousands of Kurds were denied basic civil, political, and economic rights tied to citizenship: the right to vote, work, travel, own property, register marriages and births, or perform military service. Stateless Kurds lived in a state of social exclusion marked by poverty, unemployment, and systemic discrimination.

Despite decades of protests, appeals, and promises by Syrian authorities to resolve the issue, the injustice persisted. In fact, conditions worsened with Legislative Decree No. 49 of September 10, 2008, which prohibited the registration of property transactions in border areas, further eroding Kurdish rights.

The Syrian National Organization for Human Rights described the census and its aftermath as a clear violation of Syrian nationality law and international human rights conventions ratified by Syria, warning of the damage inflicted on the country’s social fabric and national unity.

Although deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad issued Legislative Decree No. 49 in 2011 granting citizenship to Kurds registered as “foreigners” in Hasaka in a bid to win Kurdish support during the uprising, the move failed to sway the Kurdish population after five decades of repression. For many, citizenship alone could not compensate for decades of dispossession and denied rights.

The Kurdish community had already risen up in 2004 against Ba’athist oppression, sacrificing dozens of lives, with hundreds wounded and thousands detained. When the Syrian revolution erupted in 2011, Kurdish youth joined the uprising in mass, signaling that the legacy of the exceptional census and Ba’athist rule could not be erased with token gestures.

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