Citizenship revocation and statelessness of Kurds in Syria areas of Syria had to prove that they had lived there since at least 1945, or the Syrian government would not include them in the registry and grant them citizenship. Deliberately, the way in which the decree was implemented indicates that this special census was carried out in an arbitrary and ad hoc manner. The government conducted the census in only one day, for all residents of the north and northeast of the country to gather the necessary information of the Kurds of Syria. This meant that if an individual was not available that day, they were not included in the registry process. Additionally, to be registered and included, each individual was obligated to bring a list of documents on the day, that proved his/her residence in Syria in 1945. The results of this inspection were to be submitted to the central committee to confirm or reject the entry. All of these stringent requirements increased the obstacles to keeping their nationality that many Kurdish families faced, and others were forced to pay large bribes to retain it. Many reported testimonies stated that decisions to register were made arbitrarily by the local officials and state employees.12 As a result, an estimated 120,000 people, or about 20 percent of Syrian Kurds, had their citizenship revoked.13 As a result, thousands of Kurds in the North-eastern areas who had lived in Syria for hundreds of years before the date specified in the law were now no longer citizens in their own country. Because this was an arbitrary strategy and approach, Kurds of Al-Jazira were classified differently, and this resulted in the division of the Kurds in Syria into three groups.14  Kurds with Syrian citizenship.  Two categories who lost their citizenship and became stateless: a) Kurds registered by the Syrian authorities as ‘foreigners of Al-Hassaka’ or ‘aliens’ (ajanib). These were provided with a simple white piece of paper that read “His name was not on the registration lists of Syrian Arabs specific to Hassaka”.15 b) Those who refused to participate in the census and were categorised as ‘unregistered’ (maktoum).16 These were granted fewer rights than the ‘foreigners’, including a very limited access to public services, such as education and health. All of these problems led to situations in which fathers were classified as ‘foreigners of Al-Hassaka’ while their sons remained citizens, and many of those stripped of citizenship had relatives who retained their Syrian citizenship. According to Syrian-Kurdish activists,17 Kurds from the same family and Syrian village lost their citizenship as a result of the census and became ‘foreigners’. According to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report of 1996, the Syrian government clarified that the purpose of this census was identifying so-called “alien infiltrators”, and discovering how many people had illegally migrated to Syria through the borders from the Turkish Kurdistan region.18 In particular, the Syrian government’s argument in stripping the Syrian Kurds of their citizenship was that they were of Turkish origin, and had immigrated to Syria due to the Kurdish revolutions in Turkey at that time. In truth, however, as noted above, this was not the case. 12 Vanly, I. C. (1992), ‘The Kurds in Syria and Lebanon’, in Kreyenbroek, P.G. and S. Sperl (eds.), The Kurds: A Contemporary Overview, 151-152. London and New York: Routledge. 13 Tejel, J. (2008), Syria’s Kurds: History, Politics and Society. London and New York: Routledge: 50-55. 14 Refugees International (2006), Buried Alive: Stateless Kurds in Syria. https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/47a6eba80.pdf. 15 Human Rights Watch (1996), Syria: The Silenced Kurds. https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/SYRIA96.pdf, 15. 16 This was the Syrian administrative term used by the Syrian authorities in official population and civil registers to indicate the absence of the person as ‘unregistered’ in the governmental records. The word is used to refer to a discrete group of stateless Syrian Kurds, and means hidden, concealed, suppressed; kept secret or undisclosed. 17 Zoom interview with a Kurdish activist in Al-Raqa (North of Syria), 18/04/2020. 18 Human Rights Watch (1996), Syria: The Silenced Kurds. https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/SYRIA96.pdf, 21. European University Institute 7