Muhamad Alh However, since the 1990s ‘foreigners’ started to have a ‘red card’ – an identification document specifically tailored for this Kurdish population, while ‘unregistered’ Kurds held a document issued by the local councils to function as an identity proof. During this period, the Syrian regime had allowed children who are ‘unregistered’ to be admitted to primary schools after getting an approval from the Political Security division (one of Syria's internal security forces), this process obliges parents to go to police area office, as well as attending an investigation at the security apparatus of Al-Hassaka, then to the birth registration office, just to register for first grade.28 Over the period of the 1990s and 2000s, because of an urban-centred economic strategy, the tensions at local levels evolved dramatically to govern the course of the relationships between the Damascus government and Kurdish groups. According to local sources reported by Human Rights Watch29 and locally circulated, many testimonies of the Syrian Kurds deprived of Syrian nationality indicate the extent of the national, economic, social and cultural violations that they are exposed to by successive authorities in Syria. Developments and access to citizenship Considering the growing marginalisation and vulnerabilities among the Kurds of Syria over the past decades, protests and turmoil have been growing in many Kurdish regions, Damascus, and Aleppo, that coincided with assassinations and arrests among Kurdish community leaders and activists. Starting from 1998, the quiescence of the Kurds began changing due to the relaxed atmospheres of the ‘Damascus Spring’ and the demands for reform efforts in the whole of Syria. This further emboldened new Kurdish political movements for equality in political and cultural rights. With the current president Bashar AlAssad taking office in 2000, the hopes around the dilemma of Kurds were renewed. However, this quickly changed and Syrian security services soon began harassing and arresting Kurdish leaders. Accordingly, in 2004, Syria experienced one of the greatest periods of unrest in the Kurdish-populated areas of Eastern Syria, rooted in the continued struggle, discrimination and denial of citizenship rights to thousands of Kurds.30 As a result, since 2005, the official authorities in Syria have made a series of pledges and promises to solve the problem of the citizenship of Kurds, whose numbers have doubled in recent periods. Then in 2008, the government of the Syrian regime issued a decision: that was to grant the status of ‘foreigner’ to everyone born from a father who is without citizenship and a mother who holds Syrian citizenship. Before this decision, in the Kurdish context, many Kurds children of stateless fathers and national mothers could not regulate their status through their mothers and became unregistered. For instance, if a male foreigner married a woman with Syrian nationality, their children could not be registered at all, as Syrian women do not enjoy the right to pass on her nationality to their children.31 In 2010, the total number of reported Kurds denied Syrian citizenship between 1962 and 2010 reached more than 517,000.32 Importantly, this statistic does not include the stateless Kurdish emigrants to European countries or Turkey between 1962 and 2011. As a result of the Syrian uprising that started in 2011, with the outbreak of protests in both Damascus and Kurdish areas in the North East of Syria, the Ba’athist regime announced the formation of a committee to study the implementation of recommendations to solve the 1962 census problem in the northern provinces. 28 Ibid., 22. 29 Idem. See also: Minority Rights (2018), Kurds of Syria, https://minorityrights.org/minorities/kurds-5/ 30 Tejel, J. (2008), ‘The Qamishli revolt, 2004: the marker of a new era for Kurds in Syria’, in Tejel, J., Syria’s Kurds: History, Politics and Society, 108–132. New York: Routledge. 31 Article 10 of the Syrian Nationality Law 37 Chapter Seven of the Syrian Nationality Law. 32 Daraj Blog (2018), ‘Maktoums... Syrian Kurds strangers in their country’ (in Arabic). Available at: https://daraj.com/10523/ 10 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies Working Papers