These procedures weren’t innocent

The names of hundreds of villages and towns were also Arabised in the government’s official registers — but Kurdish authorities are now reversing the procedure.The town of Derek "was changed to Al-Malikiyah in 1957 in a formal decree in memory of Adnan al-Maliki", the founder of Syria’s modern army.In Joldara, 70-year-old Abdulrahman Hawas Hamo recounts the history of his village’s name as he fixes an old white truck in his yard."Even newborns had to have their names approved and Arabised by security agencies," says the employee who requested anonymity."Residents of Amuda were thrilled after the municipality announced they could add Kurdish-language signs outside their shops. More than 200 years old," he says.Soon after Syria’s uprising erupted in 2011, President Bashar al-Assad granted citizenship to thousands of Kurds and regime troops withdrew from Kurdish-majority areas in 2012."The autonomous administration then uses these names in its records and Journal Pad for sale communication," Lahdo says.Local committees are being consulted on the original Kurdish name of their hometowns.Syria’s Kurds, who number about three million, have been denied basic rights for decades by the ruling Baath Party.A handful of modest one-room mud houses make up the village, which lies in Syria’s arid Hasakeh province against a backdrop of dry hills.Between 1978 and 1998 alone, Qado says, the names of more than 500 villages in Hasakeh province were Arabised, as well as other towns like Kobane, which became known as Ain al-Arab.The roads into and out of Joldara are lined with new signs bearing the Kurdish names of nearby villages in both Arabic and Latin script."Maps will include the original Kurdish name with the Arabised name in parentheses.As part of an ambitious project by Kurdish authorities, hundreds of towns and villages in northern Syria are shedding Arabised names adopted in the 1960s in favour of their traditional Kurdish ones.Kurdish families saw the land distributions and renamings as an attempt to erase their identity.Among these, Ahmad al-Abduli’s family travelled as part of this government programme to a village now identified by its Kurdish name of Himo. But today it has gotten its older name back," the 45-year-old says."It’s a victory for us to be able to write the name of our shops in Kurdish," he says with a grin."This was the name of the village before it was Arabised by the Syrian government in 1962 and changed to Shajra," which means tree in Arabic, he explains.The community was banned from speaking or teaching the Kurdish language and celebrating Kurdish feast days, and some were barred from holding Syrian nationality."

These procedures weren’t innocent — the Arabisation was planned," Qado tells AFP in his office, surrounded by history books in Kurdish and Arabic."The process is not recognised by the Central government in Damascus, which has preserved the Arabised names in its own registers.Researcher Zohrab Qado says the Arabisation of town and village names accelerated when Syria’s Baathist regime came to power in the 1960s, but had begun the previous decade under the short-lived United Arab Republic of Syria and Egypt.An employee at the government’s civil register in Amuda, also in Hasakeh province, says place names were officially Arabised "in a formal letter from the ministry of interior".Outside the store where he sells roasted cashews and other nuts, Adnan Hoshi carefully writes out "Emise Hejar" — Kurdish for "Nut shop"."Joldara in Kurdish means a plain covered in trees," he says..Since then, Kurds have erected a parallel system of institutions, complete with schools and police units, to govern swathes of the country’s north.On a dusty road in northeast Syria, a woman and her four children stand beside a freshly erected green sign for Joldara, the Kurdish name of her village known for decades as Shajra."We came from Raqa in the 1970s, and the village name was changed at the time to Hanadi.

"We are not renaming towns and villages — we are returning to their original, historical names," says Joseph Lahdo, co-chair of the autonomous municipalities commission in Hasakeh."Our village is.According to Qado.

Syria’s government even distributed land around Kurdish villages to Arab farmers coming from the nearby province of Raqa in a bid to transform the demographic composition of northern Syria.Sheikhmous Rasho, a Kurdish farmer in his 60s, gestures excitedly in his hometown, which several weeks ago regained its original name of Girsor."But they changed the Kurdish names to Arabic, so they could say these were Arab villages and distance us from our Kurdish nationality and language.