Fifty-two years after the Regional Command of the Ba’ath Party, then Syria’s ruling body, issued Decision 521 on 24 June 1974, the “Arab Belt” (al-hizam al-arabi) has returned to the centre of Kurdish politics in northeast Syria. Kurdish parties and rights groups want it folded into Syria’s transitional justice process, and Kurdish landowners in Malikiyah (Dêrik), Jawadiyah (Çil Axa) and Darbasiyah (Dirbêsiyê) are pressing to recover fields that were allocated in the 1970s to Arab families displaced by the Euphrates Dam, who are known locally as the Ghamr (“the flooded”). Since the fall of the Assad government in December 2024, some of those families have begun leasing their land out on 99-year contracts in the Malikiyah countryside, a sign that they too expect the allocations to be challenged, according to reporting on the land market there.

Behind the land claims sits a wider belief, common in Kurdish media and party literature, that Arabisation is the main reason Hasakah province is as mixed as it is today. Kurdish outlets routinely describe the Belt as the largest demographic change in Syria’s history, involving more than 3 million dunums of land, 335 villages and 40,000 settlers.

TNC rebuilt the programme settlement by settlement, matched each colony to its subdistrict (nahiyah), and set the results against the 2004 census and a June 2026 humanitarian population count. The figures support part of that belief and contradict the rest. By 2004, people descended from the Ghamr settlers made up roughly 4 to 6% of Hasakah’s population and, in the countryside of the border subdistricts where they were placed, between one in eleven and one in five residents. By 2026 the colonies held about half as many people as they did in 2004, equal to roughly 2% of the province. Hasakah was already divided between Kurds, Arab tribes and Christian communities long before 1974, and the subdistricts that hold most of its Arab population received no Ghamr settlers at all.

Context: The idea of an Arab cordon along the Turkish border took shape in a 1963 study by Mohammed Talab Hilal, then head of political security in Hasakah, which recommended settling Arab tribesmen along the frontier and moving Kurds inland. The Ba’ath Party’s 1966 regional congress adopted the outline of a state-owned strip 10 to 15 km deep along the border, and a party study the same year put its area at 3,001,911 dunums, about 3,000 km², according to a Kurdish history of tribal settlement in the Jazira. Later accounts describe a plan to clear the Kurdish population of some 332 villages from that strip. Those figures describe the plan, and no document located for this article records 332 villages being emptied or 140,000 people being removed.

What was implemented between 1974 and 1977 was smaller, and its scale is unusually well established because sources from opposite sides, written decades apart, give the same numbers. A village-by-village register compiled by a Kurdish researcher in Qamishli (Qamişlo) lists 38 settlements, 3,977 families and 721,531 dunums of allotted land. French and German fieldwork from 1980 and 1990, summarised in an academic study of land distribution in the Jazira, recorded 41 villages, 4,600 families settled between 1974 and 1977, between 25,000 and 27,000 people, and 72,000 hectares of land, the equivalent of 720,000 dunums. An essay written to rebut the Kurdish narrative gives about 4,000 families, and a 1996 human rights report quoted an engineer who counted 41 villages built in the strip. A land total compiled by a Kurdish researcher that matches a German geographer’s fieldwork to within 0.2% is about as strong a cross-check as this subject allows.

The land distributed, about 720 km², is roughly a quarter of the planned zone. Allotments ran from 150 dunums per family around Malikiyah, where rainfall is highest, to 300 dunums around Ras al-Ayn (Serê Kaniyê). The settlers came from the roughly 14,000 families of the Walda tribe and their neighbours displaced by Lake Assad, about a third of whom were sent to the border strip. All 38 colonies lie in eight subdistricts along the Turkish border, with five each in Qahtaniyah (Tirbespî), Malikiyah, Jawadiyah and Darbasiyah, four in Qamishli, three in Amuda (Amûdê), two in Ya’rubiyah (Tell Koçer) and nine in Ras al-Ayn, according to the UN’s administrative dataset for Syria. The province’s other eight subdistricts, including Hasakah city and its hinterland, Tell Tamr, Shaddadi, Markada and al-Hol, held 43% of its population in 2004 and received no settlers.

At the time of settlement, the 25,000 to 27,000 Ghamr settlers were equal to 5.3 to 5.8% of Hasakah’s population at the 1970 census of 468,506. The figure of 40,000 settlers that circulates in Kurdish sources appears to be a round multiple of 4,000 families by ten, and the accompanying claim that they made up 6% of the province only works against the 1981 census population of 669,756.

By the 2004 census, when Hasakah had 1,275,118 residents according to official tables, TNC estimated the Ghamr-descended population in two ways. Published village counts exist for 18 colonies, which received 1,750 families in the 1970s and had 23,851 residents in 2004, or 13.6 people for every original family. Separately, a growth model that starts from about 6.3 people per family on arrival and applies Hasakah’s overall growth between 1975 and 2004 gives 14.8 people per original family, or between 55,000 and 74,000 people across all the colonies, with a central estimate of 59,000. The Arab-side essay puts the 2004 population of the Ghamr villages at 42,424, which is consistent with these figures once families living outside the colonies are allowed for. On any of these measures, people of Ghamr origin were between 3.3 and 5.8% of Hasakah in 2004, and most likely about 4.6%.

The province-wide figure hid a much heavier local concentration. Across the eight border subdistricts, people of Ghamr origin made up about 8% of the 2004 population. In Jawadiyah, a small and mainly rural subdistrict that received five colonies, the share was about a fifth. In Qahtaniyah it was about 16%, rising to about 21% outside Qahtaniyah town, followed by Darbasiyah at about 13%, Ya’rubiyah at 11% and Malikiyah at 10%. Amuda and Ras al-Ayn stood at about 7%, and Qamishli at 2.5% because of the size of the city, although the colonies accounted for about one in eight people in Qamishli’s countryside.

The war has since reduced those shares considerably. A June 2026 population baseline compiled by the UN migration agency from local informants gives counts for every colony that can be located. The 17 colonies with figures in both years had 22,870 residents in 2004 and 11,765 in 2026, a fall of about half, while the province as a whole, including people displaced into it from elsewhere, held about 1.39 million. Counting only the resident populations of the colonies, Ghamr villages now account for about 10% of Jawadiyah’s population, or up to 18% if Mashuq, which also has a Kurdish population, is included. They account for about 6.5% in Qahtaniyah, 5 to 7% in Ras al-Ayn, between 5 and 6% in Ya’rubiyah and Darbasiyah, under 3% in Amuda and Malikiyah, and 1 to 2% in Qamishli, whose population is swollen by displaced families. Across the eight border subdistricts the share is about 3 to 4%, and across the province about 2%. The baseline is an estimate from local informants rather than a census, it does not record why the colonies have shrunk, and it misses colonies that could not be matched and Ghamr families living in the towns, while some colony residents will not be of Ghamr origin.

The belief that Arabisation explains Hasakah’s diversity also runs into the province’s earlier history. When the French Mandate counted the settled population of the Jazira in 1939, the Qamishli urban district had more Christians (14,140, plus 3,500 Armenians) than Arabs (7,990) or Kurds (5,892). Hasakah town was majority Arab with a large Christian community, the Khabur villages around Tell Tamr were Assyrian, and Ras al-Ayn was split roughly equally between Arabs and Christians with a smaller Kurdish population. Only Amuda and the countryside around Malikiyah and Derouna Agha, the area that later became Jawadiyah, were overwhelmingly Kurdish, according to the Mandate figures. French geographers who surveyed the Jazira in 1953 put its population at about 41% Kurdish farmers, 34% Arab tribesmen, many of them still semi-nomadic, and about a quarter Christian, with Kurds a majority in the Tigris and Qamishli districts and Arabs a majority around Hasakah, according to their survey. Syrian censuses in 1943 and 1953 recorded Christians at 29% and then 24% of the province.

That mix was itself recent. The Shammar and Tayy tribes had long used the steppe, and Syriac Christians lived along its northern and eastern edges. Kurdish villages in the Jazira numbered at most 45 before 1927 and between 700 and 800 by 1939, after the Mandate authorities welcomed Kurds and Christians fleeing Turkey, according to a leading history of Syria’s Kurds. Since the 1950s the Christian share has fallen sharply through emigration while the Kurdish and Arab populations have grown quickly. Set against those movements, the Ghamr programme added roughly three to six percentage points to the Arab share of the province by 2004, and about two points today.

Analysis: Syria has not asked about ethnicity in a census since the French Mandate, so there is no measured Kurdish share for any of these subdistricts. The Belt’s demographic effect can still be stated precisely, because removing a group that makes up a given share of a population raises every other group’s share in a fixed proportion. With people of Ghamr origin at about 4.6% of Hasakah in 2004, a group making up 40% of the province would have been about 42% without them, and on today’s share of about 2% the difference falls below one percentage point. The picture in the border countryside was very different. In rural Qahtaniyah in 2004, where the Ghamr share was about 21%, a population that was 60% Kurdish would have been about 76% Kurdish without the colonies. On the 2026 count for the subdistrict as a whole, about 6.5%, the same 60% would be about 64%.

At the scale of the province, then, the Belt was a modest layer on top of a population that was already mixed, and it has thinned further since 2004. Along the border between Qahtaniyah and Malikiyah it placed a substantial Arab minority in areas that were, on the available evidence, strongly Kurdish. The colonies also sit where the planners wanted them, a median of 6 km from the border, which gives them a political weight beyond their numbers because they break the continuity of Kurdish villages along the frontier.

The estimates here count only the 1974 to 1977 programme. Smaller state settlement schemes, such as villages near Malikiyah settled between 1959 and 1963 by farmers from Salamiyah and other parts of Syria, and the 2007 allocation of 560 hectares of the Dijla state farm near Malikiyah to 150 families displaced by a dam on the Khabur, added to the Arab population of the border strip on a smaller scale. The 2026 figures also reflect a population reshaped by the war, including the Turkish-backed capture of Ras al-Ayn in 2019. The full settlement-level reconstruction behind this article is available on request.

The numbers cut against both of the narratives that dominate discussion of the Belt. The Kurdish account is accurate about the government’s intent, about the transfer of land in Kurdish-majority areas to outsiders, and about the scale of the effect in the border countryside at its peak. It overstates the programme when it presents the 1966 plan’s 3 million dunums, 332 villages and 140,000 people as what took place, and when it treats the Belt as the main source of the province’s diversity. The Arab-side rebuttal is accurate that the settlers were a small share of Hasakah and were themselves displaced people, and misleading when it offers a province-wide figure of 3% as a measure of their impact in places where they made up a fifth of the population.

For policy, the more consequential legacy is land. Some 720 km² was allotted, drawn from several existing villages for each colony, and the disputes that followed concern specific fields and their owners. Residents of the Aliyan area of Jawadiyah have named 15 villages whose lands they say went to two colonies, according to a recent petition, and a Kîkan tribal notable in Darbasiyah has said that 25 to 30 villages between the town and the border lost land. The leases now being signed on Ghamr land in the Malikiyah countryside show that the issue is already being settled informally, in cash and without records, and the halving of the colonies’ population since 2004 suggests that some of the land is no longer worked by the families who received it.

That makes a rights group’s proposal for an independent commission to examine claims case by case, with compensation or alternative land for Ghamr families who would otherwise be displaced a second time, the approach that fits the evidence best. The Belt’s effect on the province’s overall composition amounted to a few percentage points at most, while its effect on the ownership of land along the border was large and can be documented parcel by parcel, which is where a remedy can realistically operate.