AMMAN, Jordan — The Syrian state has exercised “systematic policies at the highest official, political and security levels to annihilate the Kurdish language in Syria,” according to Kurdish writer and poet Omar Rasoul.
Rasoul told Al-Monitor that over the past decades, the Kurdish language was marginalized and banned in Syria. Anyone who had a Kurdish book or who attempted to spread the Kurdish culture by any means was arrested in compliance with a government decree issued in 1989 that banned the official use of the Kurdish language in Syria.
