Kurds in Syria
ethnic group
The Kurdish population of Syria is the country's largest ethnic minority, usually estimated at 10% of the Syrian population 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 Ashrafiya and Sheikh Maqsood.
Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Syria, and make up between 5 and 10 percent of the Syrian population.
“Kurds in Syria” enters the record as ethnic group. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kurds, Syria and ethnic can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1792998. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kurds in Syria” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.