Country: Syria
Group: Turkmen
Date Finalized: 10/31/2022
Team: Alicia Hernandez (Lead), Lauren Poklar (Lead), Lacey Hurst
Content Warnings: forced assimilation, language suppression
Approximate Time Period: 2000-present
Turkmens are ethnic Turks who live in the territories that later emerged as the Arab states of Iraq and Syria (Ekmanian, 2016). There are approximately 3.5 million Turkmen in Syrian, only 1.5 million of whom still speak Turkish. There is a large ethnic Syrian Turkmen minority in Syria, numbering over 100,000 (Mustafa, 2015). The Syrian Turkmen Assembly was established in 2013 in response to years of oppression under Assad’s regime (Aslan, 2020). Bashar Assad’s regime implemented Arabization assimilation policies, which banned Turkmen from publishing or writing in Turkish. The Assad regime also refused to recognize them as legitimate minorities in Syria because they weren’t Arabic (BBC News, 2015). Kurds, Turkmens, and other ethnic groups in Syria were prevented from learning their own languages in schools (Ekmanian, 2016).
Data Quality: The data quality is a 1 out of 3 because there are very few sources on the Turkmen and most of them are not academic sources. There are news articles and blogs with information.
Sources
- Aslan, D. (2020, July 26). Syrian Turkmen denounce Assad regime oppression, seek Syria’s political stability. Daily Sabah. https://www.dailysabah.com/politics/syrian-turkmen-denounce-assad-regime-oppression-seek-syrias-political-stability/news
- BBC News. (2015, November 24). Who are the Turkmen in Syria? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34910389
- Ekmanian, Harout. (2016). The Peculiar Case of the Turkmens in Syria. Hetq Investigative Journalists. https://hetq.am/en/article/66022
- Mustafa, A. (2015, November). ORSAM REVIEW OF REGIONAL AFFAIRS. Orsam. https://www.orsam.org.tr/d_hbanaliz/27ing.pdf