Islamized Armenians in Rojava, Syria

TheArmenianWeekly

Around seven ethnic Armenian fighters from the YPJ (Women’s Defense Unit) sit quietly on sofas around me, smiling gently when we make eye contact. One of the young women is named Hayastan.

At the far end of the room, two Kurdish YPJ fighters sit slightly apart from us, giving us space to talk as Armenians. Later in the meeting, one of them gestures towards Hayastan and says, smiling, “Isn’t it funny that her name is Hayastan––and mine is Kurdistan?”

I’m in the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), also known as Rojava, to meet the region’s Armenian communities. Our conversation turns to the region’s Islamized Armenians––some of whom are among the fighters in the room.

Martyr Nubar Ozanyan Brigade marks Genocide Remembrance Day in Tall Tamr, April 24, 2025.

“They were martyred inside that church,” says Unger Sose, their commander, sitting across from me.

“I still get goosebumps when I think about it,” Unger Sose says, placing her hand on her arm.

A member of the Nubar Ozanyan Brigade prepares to speak at Genocide Remembrance Day in Tall Tamr, April 24, 2025.

“Pari luys, Comrade Garine”At 7:30 a.m., a knock on my door wakes me up. “Unger Garine,” Arev Qasabian calls, “Pari luys (good morning).” I open the door and ask if we’re going somewhere. “No,” she shakes her head. She shrugs and smiles to communicate: “It’s just time to wake up.”

Her husband, Abu Hayko, left at dawn for his job at Al-Hol, a fortified prison camp near the Iraqi border, where tens of thousands––mostly women and children, some displaced by ISIS and others tied to it––are held.

I’m staying at Arev’s home in Hasakah, a city with many Islamized Armenians like her—a Kurdicized Armenian whose identity bridges worlds and was almost erased forever.

As the female co-head of the Armenian Social Council, a role shared with a male counterpart to maintain gender parity in the DAANES, Arev navigates Hasakah’s power circles with ease. She takes me from meeting to meeting to the gates of PYD officials and defense force headquarters, where young men armed with AK-47s stand guard. Each time, Arev rolls down her car window and announces “Mejlis Ermeni” (Armenian Council). The guards nod in recognition, and the gates swing open.

The council that became a home

The Armenian Social Council in Hasakah––a hub for the city’s Armenian community—begins to fill with life as members gather in the main room. In the hallway, an Artsakh flag hangs on the wall. Most here are Muslim, some women wear hijabs, and they switch between Kurmanji and Arabic. None speak Armenian with any passing fluency, but all know basic phrases. “Pari luys,” they greet me, smiling. They light cigarettes, and someone brings tea and coffee on a tray to pass around.

Members of the Armenian Women’s Union in Hasakah with the author

The survivors’ childrenThey are descendants of genocide survivors––those who endured the initial massacres in Ottoman cities like Diyarbakir, Urfa and Mardin, just across the Turkish border, not far from here. They also survived the death marches, where an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenians were forcibly deported to the Syrian desert.

The desert, particularly around Deir ez-Zor and Ras al-Ayn, became a central theater of the genocide, where deportees endured grueling marches with little food or water, leading to countless deaths from exhaustion, starvation and disease. Those who somehow managed to survive were sent into concentration camps meant to eliminate the remaining.

A trilingual banner (Armenian, Arabic and Kurdish) at the Armenian Women’s Union in Hasakah, which reads “107 years after the Genocide, the Armenian Women’s Union is reestablishing itself in Syria.”

Their ancestors were often small children—some barely three—orphaned during the genocide and taken in by Arab or Kurdish families. Through force or gradual assimilation, they were Islamized, as well as Kurdicized or Arabized. As a result, many today don’t know exactly where their forebears came from in the Ottoman Empire. All they know is that they were Armenian––and they survived something that was meant to destroy them.

Family stories vary. Some ancestors were abused and even thrown out on the street after their adoptive families had biological children of their own. Others say that their ancestors were loved––even included in their adoptive parents’ wills alongside biological children.

As I listen, I’m astonished to learn that many of them are fully Armenian. Four or five generations after their Islamization, they continued to marry among each other, quietly preserving the knowledge of who among them was Armenian. Others, like Hana––who has one Armenian grandparent and the rest Arab––are no less engaged. She comes to the Council every day, fully participating alongside the others. Her bubbly personality and humor are integral to the group’s dynamic.

One day, I walked into the Council and stumbled upon an Armenian language class in progress. Hana and the others were seated around the room, one with a small child on her lap, notebooks open and pens in hand. Mgrdich, also known as Mgo––a young Armenian man from Aleppo who moved to Hasakah to teach them Armenian––is at the whiteboard, writing out verb conjugations.“I am learning Armenian. You are learning Armenian. He/she is learning Armenian.”

The repetition is about more than grammar. It’s a reclamation.

In Qamishli, another Armenia

After attending Easter mass at the Apostolic Church in Qamishli, where the Armenian community––largely Christian and Armenian-speaking––resembles other Middle Eastern communities like those in Beirut or Jerusalem, I received a call from the priest inviting me for coffee at the church. Expecting a friendly get-to-know-you visit, I stopped by a local bakery to buy pastries. But upon arriving and sitting in front of the priest, the meeting took a different turn.

His tone was sharp and irritated. He had heard I was meeting with the Islamized Armenians in Hasakah and wanted to speak with me about it. He urged me to be “careful” in engaging with them, making clear he not only did not consider them to be Armenian, but also as somehow dangerous.

Armenian youth at Hasakah’s Armenian Catholic Church during the genocide commemoration candlelight vigil, April 23, 2025.

The Armenian Catholic Church in Syria has welcomed this community.

The conversation quickly became a lecture, his line of questioning unrelenting. He constructed a chain of facts, pausing to ask, “Do you agree or not?” as if agreeing to one logical point meant endorsing his entire argument. Debating seemed pointless. His anger was visible––one eye twitching as he spoke––and I found myself wanting to leave.

He said, “I told them: prove you’re Armenian. Bring us documents, and we’ll verify them.” Then, with a triumphant smile, he added, “And they never brought me anything,” as if their lack of documentation settled the matter.

I wanted to ask if he was aware there was a genocide, and any documents that survivors—let alone, orphaned children—may have had were long gone. But I didn’t.Armenians at Hasakah’s Armenian Catholic Church during the Genocide commemoration candlelight vigil, April 23, 2025.

Revolution and recognitionIn Syria, the Assad regimes managed the Armenian community through the Armenian Apostolic Church. But because the church didn’t recognize Islamized Armenians, neither did Damascus. At the Armenian Social Council in Hasakah, members told me, “Officials would look at our documents and say, ‘You’re registered as a Kurd or an Arab, and as Muslim––how can you be Armenian?’”

The 2012 Rojava revolution and the establishment of the DAANES created a turning point. Rooted in democratic confederalism, its system promotes ethnic inclusivity and local self-governance. This development suddenly cracked open a space for Islamized Armenians, long pushed to the margins, to organize.

In 2019, they founded the Armenian Social Council as a hub for community and the Martyr Nubar Ozanyan Brigade for self-defense, both bodies embodying the revolutionary ethos of gender equality and ethnic inclusivity. Named after  Turkish-Armenian revolutionary Nubar Ozanyan, who fought in the first Artsakh War, the brigade defends against threats like Turkish military operations, which echo the historical violence of the 1915 genocide. Here, Muslim and Christian Armenians alike—women leading alongside men—assert their identity.

Reaching the scattered

Once established, the Armenian Social Council launched outreach efforts to locate other Islamized Armenian families scattered across villages in the DAANES. Through painstaking networking and investigation in remote areas, they estimated that over 20,000 Islamized Armenians live in the region, their identities hidden in plain sight.

Grain silos bearing an image of Abdullah Öcalan in Hasakah

Responses to contact were mixed. Some families hesitated, wary that the Armenian Social Council sought to convert them to Christianity––an act that, in this region, could provoke retaliation for apostasy by certain groups.“We told them that’s not our purpose,” Arev explained. “We are not here for religion.”

Others were shocked and overjoyed to discover other Armenians, their isolation broken after generations of believing they were the last of their kind.

All were encouraged to visit the Armenian Social Council in Hasakah. Over time, the number of people who regularly participate has grown––some drawn to Armenian language classes, others to the chance to simply gather with others who share their history––transforming the space into a community for people rediscovering their roots.

The keys the Church still holds

Their achievements in beginning to rebuild a community against all odds were genuinely remarkable. So, when talk turned again to the Armenian Apostolic Church’s rejection, I pushed back gently: “Do you even need the church? Look at what you’ve already created on your own.”

“It’s true,” Fairuz said. But still. The church mattered for two reasons:

First, the Armenian Church in the Middle East has long wielded outsized influence, not just spiritually but politically and socially, mediating relations between the community and the state. Without its recognition, Islamized Armenians remain invisible in certain ways.

Armenian youth at Hasakah’s Armenian Catholic Church during the genocide commemoration vigil, April 23, 2025.

Second, and no less important, the church’s rejection is about more than faith. “It’s not just that the church doesn’t accept us,” Arev told me. “It’s that they tell us: you are not Armenian.” For a people who have clung to their identity through genocidal violence and generations of erasure, this denial strikes at their core.Armenians, both Muslim and Christian, at the Genocide commemoration vigil in Hasakah, April 23, 2025.

But their vision is broader than just this small battle. They want to be embraced by the global Armenian community, and their argument is compelling: “We are a resource,” they say. Rooted in the DAANE’s democratic spirit, their unique identity––bridging the Muslim world, the Kurdish movement and Syrian society––offers strength and flexibility at a critical juncture in Armenian history.

The weight of the unspeakableFor one interview with a Kurdicized Armenian woman, I was accompanied by my Kurdish translator, whose deep interest in Armenian history and the genocide made her an eager and thoughtful collaborator. Her family, originally from Afrin, was displaced in 2018 during an invasion by Turkish forces and their proxies, including mercenaries from the Sultan Murad and Hamza Divisions––the same groups later deployed to Artsakh in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War.

As the cool evening settled in, we sat in the interviewee’s courtyard, sipping tea. She began recounting her family’s genocide story, passed down through generations. At one moment, I noticed my translator was crying. My interviewee, too, was wiping away tears as she shared her story.

Still with tears in her eyes, my translator looked at me and asked, “How am I supposed to translate this?” I gently nudged her to at least give me a sense of what was being said. She buried her face in her hands, took a moment to collect herself, then exhaled and rushed through the account—a harrowing story of starvation and the cannibalism of a boy. She wouldn’t say any more.

The weight of what happened hung in the air. It wasn’t just the horror of the act or the desperate conditions that led to it. It was the intergenerational shame and grief it carried, so profound that it reverberated, four or five generations later to haunt my respondent. Maybe the guilt, too, had been passed down––a horrible sense that her family’s survival hinged on this act. That without it, she might not have been born.

I thought of the priest and his rigid precepts of who could claim Armenian identity. I imagined him here, confronted by this woman’s story––imagined myself daring him to tell her she wasn’t Armenian, to tell her that the inherited pain of what happened to her family wasn’t even hers to claim.

Armenian women soldiers, both Muslim and Christian, at the Genocide commemoration vigil in Hasakah, April 23, 2025.

This inherited pain seemed to drive everything they did. They hadn’t just survived physical death against staggering odds but also endured generations of assimilation––a near-total erasure of identity––only to begin the long, deliberate work of reclaiming who they are. This revival was made possible by the pluralist ethos of DAANES, alongside Kurds, Arabs and Assyrians. Though fragile—particularly with Syria’s recent change in government and uncertainties surrounding the DAANES’s future—this system has largely protected its people from the violence that has plagued the rest of Syria.

Talaat Pasha’s words, “They can live in the desert but nowhere else,” encapsulated the Ottoman regime’s genocidal intent: to deport Armenians to the Syrian desert with the express purpose of annihilation––physically through massacres, starvation, disease and exposure, and culturally by severing their connection to land, tradition and community. Display at the Martyr Nubar Ozanyan Brigade’s Genocide commemoration event in Tall Tamr, April 24, 2025.

What the Armenians of DAANES are doing today is an act of defiance against that project.

In the face of Turkey’s ongoing genocide denial and continued aggression––evident in the displacement of Kurds, like my translator—rejection by the Armenian Church and the slow grind of cultural erasure, these individuals are not only reclaiming identity but regenerating it, beginning a new chapter of Armenian existence.

It is a powerful rebuttal to the attempt to erase them—a declaration that Armenians not only survived the desert, but continue to thrive beyond it.