Looks like they're preparing to ethnically cleanse the Kurdish quarter of Damascus.
Under Islamist Chants, Damascus’s Kurdish Zorava Neighbourhood Comes Under PressureSome Kurdish families are fleeing Damascus as Islamist forces target the Kurdish neighbourhood of Zorava, which has been subject to security raids and government forces arresting multiple residents.
Last January, Kurds across Syria faced a renewed wave of violence after public calls for jihad by Islamist forces that reign in Syria. The attacks began in Aleppo and soon extended into the country’s northeastern region. As the military attacks in North and East Syria (NES) ramped up, the government also imposed a security cordon on Zorava.
Kurds from Zorava, which is home to 50,000 Damascene Kurds, describe tightening security, harassment at government checkpoints based on ethnic identity and political affiliation and having their cell phones searched, and forces chanting extremist Islamist anthems. The current conditions are eerily familiar to many of its residents, who have lived through both the dictatorial al-Assad regime and witnessed the terror rule of ISIS.
<The roots of the Kurds in DamascusThe Kurdish presence in Syria’s Damascus can be traced back more than a thousand years, but it was during the 16th century Ottoman rule that Kurds migrated from what is now southern Turkey in large groups. In that period, several Kurdish neighbourhoods emerged in Damascus. The largest and oldest of these was “Hayy al-Akrad” (Arabic: The Kurdish Neighbourhood), which was later renamed to “Rukn al-Din” in the mid-20th century as part of the Arabization policies enforced during Egyptian-Syrian unification.
Following the union’s dissolution in 1961, the new Ba’athist state continued to promote the idea of an Arab nation based on one shared language, culture, and history. At its extreme, this took the form of racism and chauvinism, with non-Arab identities being labelled a threat to national unity and security.
<Syria’s Kurds under the modern nation-stateLife for Kurds under the Syrian state changed dramatically in 1962. Presidential Decree No.93 ordered a census in the northeastern governorate of Hasakah, where most Kurds lived. Ostensibly, this was for the purpose of identifying “alien infiltrators”, by recording how many people had cross
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