Syrian Citizenship Disappeared ceive them back. While I was in the Department I ran into a person who gave me the phone number of an employee working in Damascus who he claimed could help me resolve my status. Indeed I contacted him and asked him about my documents and my relatives’. He told me that one of the them was sent to the Political Security Branch in Damascus, and was not sent back, while the other documents were sent back to al-Hasakah to be complemented. It was just like a repeated cycle, and my attempts were to no avail. I contacted an employee working at Damascus’s Personal Status Department trying to bribe him in order to help me resolve my legal status, but he told me that I had to resubmit my papers.” Narin Nawaf Mahmoud, a maktumah, tried to submit her papers to the Personal Status Department located in Qamishli in 2012, with the aim to acquire the citizenship. None of her attempts worked because the employees kept on telling her that her papers would be sent along with other people’s to al-Hasakah and then to Damascus city. Firas Salim Ali recalled for STJ that when he was following-up the procedures in the Personal Status Department located in Qamishli to resolve his legal status as a maktum, the employees were always telling him that they have no idea about his papers except that they might be in Damascus or in al-Hasakah. He noted that a while ago, he paid SYP 130,000 as a bribe in order to be able to obtain the ID and the family book but nothing worked. Abdulqader Hasan, a maktum, testified that whenever he went to the Personal Status Department located in Qamishli to resolve his legal status, the employees were always using the pretext that there are some mistakes in his papers: “Our attempts did not succeed. Recently, I went to the Personal Status Department, where the employees told me that there was another mis- take in my papers that I had to modify. Actually, I have come to realise that they do not want our legal status to be resolved. Many maktumeen have submitted their papers to no avail, only two maktumeen families, whom I know, managed to acquire the Syrian nationality but illegally ¹²⁴.” 11 Moheiydin Me’o Musa went repetively to the Personal Status Department located in alHasakah to resolve his legal status as a maktum, but failed. Sanad Mohammed was born in Qamishli in 1980 and is now married with four children. He has made numerous attempts to resolve his legal status as a maktum but the employees in the Personal Status Department kept on deleting some of his papers and asking him to modify others: “Every time, they asked me to submit a new document. Once, they told me that most of my documents were invalid, so I came back and applied again. It cost me a lot of time, effort and money to request them, and since then I have been following up the matter but to no avail. So many ajanib managed to acquire the nationality, while we remained maktumeen.” Abdurrahman Ibrahim Ali, a maktum, also lost hope of acquiring the nationality despite the repeated attempts he had made: “Following the issue of Decree No. 49, that granted nationality to ajanib, we heard that they would also accept the papers of the maktumeen. I headed with all of my family members along with both my uncles’ families to the Civil Status Department in Qamishli/Qamishlo city to submit. There was an age assessment committee before which we should appear. When it was my father’s turn, who is over seventy years old, they asked us to bring a witness 124 STJ's field researcher conducted direct interview with him in Qamishli in March 2018. 49