Syrian authorities on Thursday removed a bilingual Kurdish-Arabic billboard from the Justice Palace in Hasaka, the largest city in Syria’s Kurdish-majority northeast, replacing it with signage in English and Arabic only. The move ignited immediate public fury. Locals gathered outside the building chanting “Kurdistan” before forcibly tearing down the newly installed sign, an act of defiance underscoring how language rights remain a volatile fault line despite formal legal protections.
The exclusion of Kurdish directly contradicts Presidential Decree No. 13 of 2026, signed by President Ahmed al-Sharaa on January 16. That decree recognized Kurdish as a national language alongside Arabic for the first time in Syrian legal history. It also restored citizenship to Syrian Kurds stripped in the notorious 1962 Hasaka census, authorized Kurdish-language instruction in schools with sizable Kurdish populations, designated Nowruz as a paid national holiday, and explicitly prohibited ethnic or linguistic discrimination. Yet officials in Damascus have offered no explanation for why Kurdish was omitted from the Justice Palace signage.
The Kurdish administration in northeast Syria had greeted the decree cautiously, calling it merely “a first step” and warning that “rights are not safeguarded by temporary decrees, but through enduring constitutions that reflect the will of the people.” Thursday’s events appeared to validate those concerns, with street-level resistance replacing diplomatic caution as residents took matters into their own hands.
The incident comes amid delicate efforts to integrate Rojava’s civilian and military institutions into Syrian state structures. On January 29, the Syrian government and the Syrian Democratic Forces signed a 14-point agreement to place SDF units under state command, transfer strategic border crossings and oil fields to central control, and merge autonomous administrative bodies into national government structures. That deal followed intense military confrontations earlier in January, when Damascus-aligned forces launched offensives across Aleppo, Deir ez-Zor, Raqqa, and Hasaka. The SDF withdrew from several positions after Washington signaled its readiness to work through the Syrian state rather than preserve a distinct Kurdish-led security role. Many Kurds view the broader integration push as a potential rollback of the autonomy they built during more than a decade of conflict.
Education has emerged as a central battleground in the integration process. Two proposals for Kurdish-language schooling are currently under discussion: introducing Kurdish as a weekly elective limited to two hours or translating the Syrian national curriculum into Kurdish for optional instruction in majority-Kurdish localities including Hasaka, Kobane, Afrin, and Sheikh Maqsoud. Hasaka Governor Nour al-Din Issa Ahmed has publicly emphasized that “providing school curricula in Kurdish is critical to the success of integration talks” and would “act as a guarantee for the agreement’s success.” However, Kurdish education advocates argue that recent statements by official Ahmed al-Hilali insisting the Syrian national curriculum remain “the sole educational framework” directly undermine Decree No. 13’s recognition of Kurds as an indigenous people entitled to national-language status. Critics warn that without substantive bilingual education, the decree risks becoming little more than window dressing.
This is not the first such dispute. In the Kurdish city of Kobane, authorities recently unveiled locality billboards in Arabic only, adding Kurdish after widespread public anger. The episode contrasted with a May 2025 municipal council vote in Kobane that made it mandatory for businesses to display Kurdish alongside Arabic on shop signs, giving owners two months to comply and reflecting the community’s push to normalize its language in public life.