Syrian Citizenship Disappeared Aziz, maktum, is still exposed to embarrassing situations including the prohibition of accession hotels unless permission granted from the localHotels Management Department. “In 1991, I travelled to Damascus and I remained homeless until midnight because I wasn’t entitled to sleep in hotels. At last I managed to sleep in a hotel with the mediation and guarantee of a police officer. During 2003, 2004, and 2005 I took part in the demonstrations held in protest of depriving us from nationality but the security apparatus arrested me two or three times enquiring if I was Syrian to which I replied I was a Syrian Kurd. They asked for a proof to be Syrian expressing there was nothing called a Syrian Kurd, either to be Syrian or to be Kurdish.” Dlo Mohammed, a pseudonym, also pointed out she had faced several racist and humiliating situations because of her legal status as maktumah: “The ajanib used to hold a red card as a proof of their identity and residence and some of the people were mocking it and called it the certificate of the cows. For the maktumeen, we held only a paper on which the name and date of birth were registered, and stamped by the mukhtar. So my friends were mocking it: “you even don’t have the certificate of the cows!” That was painful but a fact. During the years of my university study in Latakia, I faced difficulty in explaining the concept of ajanib and maktumeen to the employees of government departments as well as the ordinary people. They had no idea about the issue of the stateless, and when they learned I am maktumah with no Syrian ID, they thought I came from another country.” For Rasheed Hussein, the status of maktumeen was harder than the ajanib’s, who, at least, had a red card proving their identity and place of residence. He narrated one of the uneasy situations he encountered for being maktum: 46 “I recall when I was in the primary school that some students used to mock me unintentionally because I am a maktum, I was also not permitted to participate in school activities such as the pioneer competitions ¹¹⁹6 and the Tala’i al-Ba’ath Camp, which led me to alienation, and I started to feel that studying is useless. We have been treated as strangers in our own country. The situation outside al-Hasakah was far worse, the employees of government institutions and the ordinary people are not familiar with the maktumeen issue, and when I tell them that I don’t have a Syrian ID, they think I’m a foreigner.” Mahmoud Ahmad Khalil described one situation as cruel because of his previous legal status as ajnabi: “One day my father’s health situation deteriorated and so we took him to Damascus and Aleppo for treatment. We were forced to stay in the hotels but they were asking for a permission from the Hotels Management Department. Since we were deprived of that as well, we were forced to take my father with us to the Hotels Management Department to be granted the permission. We often faced that problem because my father often got sick.” Mohammed Amin Ramadan al-Mohammed was not able to treat his mother who had cancer in a government hospital in Damascus because of their previous legal status as ajanib. He remembers when the employees at the hospital expelled his mother and threw her papers in her face: “I still remember how they called the security guards for us and my mother fainted and fell on the ground. I cried and thought about jumping and throwing myself from a storey of the hospital but my brother pre119 It is one of the important activities held every year among primary schools in a specific area to discover the talents of the pupils in different fields of study like Mathematics, languages, art, science, etc.