Al-Jazira Province


Al-Jazira Province was an administrative division in the State of Aleppo, the State of Syria and the first decades of the Mandatory Syrian Republic, during the French Mandate of Syria and the Lebanon. It encompassed more or less the present-day Al-Hasakah Governorate and part of the former Ottoman Zor Sanjak, created in 1857.

Demographics

Until the beginning of the 20th century, al-Hasakah Governorate was a "no man's land" primarily reserved for the grazing land of nomadic and semi-sedentary tribes. During World War I and subsequent years, thousands of Assyrians fled their homes in Anatolia after massacres. After that, massive waves of Kurds fled their homes in the mountains of Turkey due to conflict with Kemalist authorities and settled in Syria, where they were granted citizenship by the French Mandate authorities. The number of Kurds settled in the Jazira province during the 1920's was estimated at 20,000 people.
French authorities were not opposed to the streams of Assyrians/Syriacs, Chaldeans, Armenians or Kurds who, for various reasons, had left their homes and had found refuge
in Syria. The French authorities themselves generally organized the settlement of the refugees. One of the most important of these plans was carried out in Upper Jazira in northeastern Syria where the French built new towns and villages were built with the intention of housing the refugees considered to be "friendly". This has encouraged the non-Turkish minorities that were under Turkish pressure to leave their ancestral homes and property, they could find refuge and rebuild their lives in relative safety in neighboring Syria. Consequently, the border areas in al-Hasakah Governorate started to have a Kurdish majority, while Arabs remained the majority in river plains and elsewhere.
In 1939, French mandate authorities reported the following population numbers for the different ethnic and religious groups in al-Hasakah city centre.
DistrictArabKurdChristianArmenianYezidiAssyrian
Hasakah city centre7,1333605,700500
Tell Tamer8,767
Ras al-Ayn2,2831,0252,263
Shaddadi2,6106
Tell Brak4,509905200
Qamishli city centre7,9905,89214,1403,500720
Amuda11,2601,500720
Al-Darbasiyah3,0117,8992,382425
Chagar Bazar3803,8103
Ain Diwar3,608900
Derik 441,6851,204
Mustafiyya34495950
Derouna Agha5705,09727
Tel Koger 165

The population of the governorate reached 155,643 in 1949, including about 60,000 Kurds.
The inhabitants of al-Hasakah governorate are composed of different ethnic and cultural groups, the larger groups being Arabs and Kurds in addition to a significant large number of Assyrians and a smaller number of Armenians. The population of the governorate, according to the country's official census, was 1,275,118, and was estimated to be 1,377,000 in 2007, and 1,512,000 in 2011.
According to the National Association of Arab Youth, there are 1717 villages in Al-Hasakah province: 1161 Arab villages, 453 Kurdish villages, 98 Assyrian villages and 53 with mixed populations from the aforementioned ethnicities.
Arab villages1,161
Kurdish villages453
Assyrian villages98
Mixed Arab–Kurdish villages48
Mixed villages3
Mixed villages2
Total1,717

Censuses of 1943 and 1953

Among the Sunni Muslims, mostly Kurds and Arabs, there were about 1,500 Circassians in 1938.
In 1949, there were officially 155,643 inhabitants. The French geographers Fevret and Gibert estimated that there were about 50,000 Arabs, 60,000 Kurds, a few thousands Jews and Yezidis, the rest being Christians of various denominations.

Demographic policies

In the 1920s after the failed Kurdish rebellions in Kemalist Turkey, there was a large influx of Kurds to Syria’s Jazira province. It is estimated that 25,000 Kurds fled at this time to Syria, under French Mandate authorities, who encouraged their immigration, and granted them Syrian citizenship. However, the French official reports show the existence of at most 45 Kurdish villages in Jazira prior to 1927. A new wave of refugees arrived in 1929. The mandatory authorities continued to encourage Kurdish immigration into Syria, and by 1939, the villages numbered between 700 and 800. Sperl's estimation also contradicts the estimates of the French geographers Fevret and Gibert, who estimated that in 1953 out of the total 146,000 inhabitants of Jazira, agriculturalist Kurds made up 60,000, nomad Arabs 50,000, and a quarter of the population were Christians.

Politics

In February 1935, the Italian Consul Alberto Rossi wrote from Aleppo:
In 1936-1937 there was some autonomist agitation in the province among Assyrians and Kurds, supported by some Arab Bedouins. Its leaders were Michel Dôme, the Armenian Catholic president of the Qamishli municipality, Hajo Agha, the Kurdish chief of the Heverkan tribal confederation and one of the leaders of the Kurdish nationalist party Khoybun, and the Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignatius Gabriel I Tappouni. They wanted the French troops to stay in the province in the hypothesis of a Syrian independence, as they feared the nationalist Damascus government would replace minority officials by Muslim Arabs from the capital.
The French authorities, although some in their ranks had earlier encouraged this anti-Damascus movement, as emphasized by the Italian Consul, refused to consider any new status of autonomy inside Syria and even annexed the Alawite State and the Jabal Druze State to the Syrian Republic. The new government in Paris since June 1936 was headed by a Socialist, Léon Blum, after the victory of the Popular Front at the April–May 1936 Parliamentary elections and had a different vision on the future of Syria than the precedent right-wing government that led to the Franco–Syrian Treaty of Independence, signed in September 1936.