The Kurdish population of Syria is the country's largest ethnic minority, usually estimated at 10% of the Syrian population Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Syria, constituting around 10 per cent of the population – around 2 million of the pre-conflict population of around 22 million. In this atlas, French geographer Balanche suggests that "As of 2010, Syria’s population was roughly 65% Sunni Arab, 15% Kurdish, 10% Alawite, 5% Christian, 3% Druze, 1% Ismaili, and 1% Twelver Shia." (p. 13) "The number of Kurds in Syria is often underestimated by analysts, who tend to cap them at 10% of the population. In fact, they are closer to 15%."(p. 16) The 2018 breakdown is 1% Sunni Arab, 16% Kurdish, 13% Alawite, 3% Christian, 4% Druze, 1% Ismaili, 1% Twelver Shia, 1% Turkmen (p. 22) Balanche also refers to his Atlas du ProcheOrient Arabe (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2011), p. 36." and 9% of the Kurdish population.
The majority of Syrian Kurds are originally Turkish Kurds who have crossed the border during different events in the 20th century. There are three major centers for the Kurdish population in Syrian, the northern part of the Jazira, the central Euphrates Region around Kobanî and in the west the area around Afrin. All of these are on the Syria-Turkey border, and there are also substantial Kurdish communities in Aleppo and Damascus further south.
During Ba'athist rule, human rights organizations accused the Syrian government of routinely discriminating and harassing Syrian Kurds. Many Kurds seek political autonomy for what they regard as Western Kurdistan, similar to the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, or to be part of an independent state of Kurdistan. In the context of the Syrian Civil War, Kurds established the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.
Demographics Syrian Kurds live mainly in three Kurdish pockets in northern Syria adjacent to Turkey. Many Kurds also live in the large cities and metropolitan areas of the country, for example, in the neighborhood Rukn al-Din in Damascus, which was formerly known as Hayy al Akrad (Kurdish Quarter), and the Aleppo neighborhoods of al AshrafiyaTejel (2009) p. 100 and Sheikh Maqsood.
Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Syria, and make up between 5 and 10 percent of the Syrian population. The estimates are diluted due to the effects of the Syrian civil war and the permeability of the Syrian-Turkish border. The Kurdish population in Syria is relatively small in comparison to the Kurdish populations in nearby countries, such as Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. The majority of Syrian Kurds speak Kurmanji, a Kurdish dialect spoken in Turkey and northeastern Iraq and Iran.
It is estimated that at the beginning of the 20th century around 12,000 Kurds lived in Damascus; an unknown number of Kurds lived in the Kurd-Dagh region; 16,000 Kurds lived in the Jarabulus region; and an unknown number lived in the Jazira province, where they were likely the majority. The extension of the railway and road to Nusaybin in 1918 intensified the immigration of Kurds southwards into the Syrian foothills and plains along rivers. In the 1920s after the failed Kurdish rebellions in Kemalist Turkey, there was a large migration of Kurds to Syria's Jazira province. It is estimated that 25,000 Kurds fled at this time to Syria. The French official reports show the existence of 45 Kurdish villages in Jazira prior to 1927. A new wave of refugees arrived in 1929. The French authorities continued to allow Kurdish migration into the Mandate, and by 1939, the villages numbered between 700 and 800. The French geographers Fevret and Gibert estimated that in 1953 out of the total 146,000 inhabitants of Jazira, agriculturalist Kurds made up 60,000 (41%), nomad Arabs 50,000 (34%), and a quarter of the population were Christians.
Even though some Kurdish communities have a long history in Syria, most Syrian Kurds originate from Turkey and have immigrated during the 20th century to escape the harsh repression of the Kurds in that country. Kurds were later joined in Syria by a new large group that drifted out of Turkey throughout the interwar period during which the Turkish campaign to assimilate its Kurdish population was at it highest. The government has used the fact that some Kurds fled to Syria during the 1920s to claim that Kurds are not indigenous to the country and to justify its discriminatory policies against them.
History
Late antiquity In the year 568, a place called "Tella de-Qurdaye" was recorded near Damascus in Syriac sources, which was probably a military settlement and denoted the "Kurdish hill" according to Theodor Nöldeke. The Syriac scholar and Archbishop of Damascus Iqlīmyus Yūsuf Dāwūd stated that Kurds were present in Damascus before the seventh century.
Contact between Kurds and the Ghassanids goes back at least to Ghassanid raids into Sasanian territory during the reign of Shapur II (309–379 CE). Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh describes the Ghassanid commander Ṭāʾir leading a coalition of Romans, Cadusians, Baḥrainis, Kurds, and Persians against the Sasanian capital Ctesiphon. These early encounters in the Jazīra probably fed later Arab legends about Kurdish origins. Both Al-Masudi and al-Bakri recorded traditions claiming the Kurds had once been Arabs who fell out with the Ghassanids, retreated into the mountains and gradually lost their Arabic. Al-Bakrī, citing al-Jayhānī, placed the original Kurdish homeland between the land of Judea in the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula, while Ibn Gharsiya noted that the Christian Arab tribe of Banū Salīḥ in southern Syria had intermarried with Kurds and Nabataeans. The Kurds attested in southern Syria most likely arrived either as nomadic groups from Upper Jazīra, helped by good relations with Arab tribes, or as soldiers serving in Roman or Sasanian armies.
Middle Ages Al-Masudi noted in The Meadows of Gold that Kurdish tribes, including al-Danabila, had settled in the Levant, and later records mention Kurdish princes governing parts of the region, among them Mir Muhammad (d. 997). Al-Muzhiri in al-Mafatih and al-Tibi both asserting that the Kurds of the Levant descended from the Prophet Isaac, a claim raised in the course of interpreting a hadith concerning the conquest of Constantinople.
A separate account preserved by Ihsan Abbas describes a military engagement near Apamea between Kurds under Abu al-Hajjar al-Mu’ammal ibn Musbih and the Hamdanid governor of Homs, suggesting an established Kurdish presence deep within Syrian territory well before the Ayyubid period. Al Wahrani referred to the Kurds in his literary Manamāt, placing the judge Ibn Darbas al-Kurdi alongside the Umayyad caliph Yazid ibn Muawiya in a single fictional vision, a deliberate anachronism in service of his polemical purposes, though the work remains a useful mirror of the social landscape of the Levant in his era.
Kurdish ties to Aleppo consolidated during the Hamdanid period through intermarriage on both sides. A Hamdanid emir married Fatima bint Ahmad Hazarmardi, while the Marwanid ruler of Diyarbakir Said ibn Marwan wed the granddaughter of Sayf al-Dawla. These unions opened Aleppo to a growing Kurdish presence, and Kurdish relatives of the Hamdanids were a familiar sight at court. That presence is perhaps best illustrated by an exchange at Sayf al-Dawla’s majlis, where a discussion arose comparing the standing of Arabs and Kurds, prompting the prince to ask his poet al-Mutanabbi for his view, a question whose very framing speaks to how visible and consequential the Kurdish element had become in Hamdanid political life.
The Mirdasids had established Hisn al-Akrad (Krak des Chevaliers), a fortress situated roughly forty kilometers west of Homs, and came to rely on Kurds from 1031 onward to protect the roads connecting Homs and Hama to the coastal ports of Tartus and Tripoli, after whom the fortress took its name, meaning "Fortress of the Kurds".
Under the Burids in Damascus, Kurdish figures assumed more prominent roles in military and civic life. The Kurdish emir Buzan ibn Mamin led Kurdish troops and founded two mosques in Damascus, one near Bab al-Khawwassin and another outside Bab al-Faradis, along with the Mujahidiyah Madrasa. Hama was governed by a Kurdish figure known as Ali Kurd. Ibn al-Qalanisi records that in 1134, Emir Shams al-Muluk enlisted a Kurdish man from the Homs region named Badran al-Kafir to oversee the confiscation of funds from state officials.
Zengid and Ayyubid periods As early as 1127, when Imad al-Din Zengi became atabeg of Mosul, Kurdish tribes were drawn into a massive recruitment process as the Zengids consolidated control over the Kurdish-dominated mountains north of Mosul, with their fortresses seized and their warriors integrated into Zengid armies. This policy deepened under Nur al-Din, who systematically relied on Kurdish military expertise to confront the Crusaders, resulting in a steady flow of Kurdish fighters into the cities and garrisons of the Levant, including the Kurdish Ayyubid family, as Najm al-Din Ayyub served as governor of Baalbek and later Damascus, while his brother Shirkuh served as a military commander and led Zengid armies into Egypt in 1169.
This presence deepened further under the Ayyubid dynasty (1171–1341), with Damascus serving as its Syrian administrative centre. The Kurdish tribes and regiments that accompanied Saladin, among them the Ḥumaydiyya, Mihrāniyya, Hakkāriyya, and Zarzāriyya, established distinct settlements in and around Damascus, which evolved into neighborhoods including Hayy al-Akrad (the Kurdish quarter) and al-Salihiyah on the northeastern slopes of Mount Qasioun. In Aleppo, Ibn Shaddad recorded in Al-a’laq al-khatira four Kurdish mosques clustered in a single district near al-Ḥāḍir al-Sulaymānī, among them the Mihrani mosque, the Zarzari mosque, the mosque of the Bashnawiyya, and a mosque in Harat al-Akrad. Ibn Tulun listed the village of Tell Kurdi among the settlements of Ghuta.
Emirate of Kilis The Sharafnama describes the Kurdish Emirate of Kilis that encompassed Afrin, Harem, Azaz, Kilis, and the northern reaches of Kurd Mountain. Its founder Mand built his authority under Ayyubid patronage, receiving the fortress of al-Qusayr west of Aleppo as a fief, around which the local Kurds gradually coalesced under his rule. He went on to unite the dispersed Kurdish communities between Hama and Maraş, bringing even the Kurdish Yazidi sheikhs of the region to heel after initial resistance. The mountainous district of Mount Simeon still retains Yazidi villages to this day.
The Mamluks proved hostile after the fall of the Ayyubids, assassinating the ruling emir Habib Bek by luring him to Aleppo, and later engineering the downfall of Qasim Bek by delegating Kurdish authority to his rival Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Kurdi. When the Ottoman Sultan Selim I conquered the region, Qasim Bek declared his loyalty, but Izz al-Din accused him of treachery before the governor of Aleppo, leading to his execution and the transfer of the emirate to Izz al-Din.
Mamluk period Ottoman tax registers record a mosque known as the "Mosque of the Kurds" in Jableh, endowed with agricultural revenues, pointing to the existence of a Kurdish landowning class in the region since the Circassian Mamluk period. The plateau surrounding Jableh and Latakia continued to be known as Jabal al-Akrad, and several villages in the area still bear names that reflect this heritage, among them Duwayr al-Akrad, Mazraat al-Akrad, and Bayt al-Kurdi.
Under the Mamluks, the Qaymariyya Kurdish emirs, who had played a decisive role in delivering Damascus to An-Nasir Yusuf in 1250 by opening the city’s gates to his army, continued to wield military influence in Syria during the early Mamluk period, as documented by the historian al-Khazraji. Kurds also occupied prominent judicial positions across Syria and Egypt throughout this period.