Author: Judi Aldalati, Journalist and Researcher

Introduction

Under Syria’s Nationality Law, issued by Legislative Decree No. 276 in 1969, a child is Syrian only if their father is Syrian. A Syrian mother married to a foreign national cannot pass on her citizenship to her children. The structural design of the policy is rooted in paternal lineage (jus sanguinis), a principle inherited from the French Mandate’s codification of the Napoleonic Civil Code, which Syria absorbed into its legal system without reform for more than five decades.^[1]

The fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 opened a rare window for constitutional change. In January 2026, Transitional President Ahmad al-Sharaa issued Presidential Decree No. 13, granting Syrian citizenship to all Kurdish individuals residing on Syrian territory, including those previously registered as stateless following the 1962 Hasaka census. This was a significant signal: National belonging in Syria can be redefined when political will exists.^[2] The question now is whether that political will extends to Syrian mothers as the 1969 law has systematically excluded them from equal parenthood. 

Demonstrated Impact During the Conflict

Syria’s nationality law was already discriminatory before 2011. The armed conflict transformed it into a social protection catastrophe affecting several groups.^[3]

More than 12 million Syrians were forcibly displaced after 2011, among them hundreds of thousands of women who entered into marriages with non-Syrian partners, including Palestinian refugees, foreign fighters, stateless Kurds, and nationals of neighbouring countries.^[4] The children born from these unions fell into a legal gap: Unable to acquire Syrian nationality through their mothers, and often unable to acquire the father’s nationality either, for a range of practical and legal reasons.

The documentation crisis compounded this. By 2018, the United Nations classified civil documentation in Syria into three categories: Official government documents, documents issued by non-state actors, and informal local records.^[5]In areas outside regime control, formal birth registration collapsed. Thousands of children were born without any documentation at all, making their already precarious nationality status effectively impossible to regularize.

The most visible and complex context was the al-Hol and Roj camps in northeast Syria, where an estimated 29,000 children were held, a significant proportion of whom were born to Syrian mothers.^[6] Many of these children are stateless by default. Following the transitional government’s uncoordinated closure of the camps in early 2026, these children are now dispersed across Syrian cities, carrying no legal identity that the state recognizes.^[7]

Who Bears the Cost

The populations most directly harmed by this policy are Syrian women married to foreign nationals, their children, and any child whose paternal line cannot be legally established, including children of missing or disappeared fathers, a category that numbers in the tens of thousands in post-conflict Syria.

For Kurdish women, the situation had a particular dimension. Prior to Decree No. 13 of 2026, stateless Kurdish men registered as Maktoumeen (unregistered) or Ajanib (foreigners) could not pass any nationality at all. A Syrian Kurdish woman married to a stateless Kurdish man produced children who were entirely stateless, excluded from both parents’ nationalities.^[8] Decree No. 13 partially addressed the fathers’ status, but the mothers’ inability to transmit nationality remains unreformed.

Statelessness as a Social Protection Failure

The consequences of nationality deprivation are not abstract. They map directly onto the core pillars of social protection.

Children without Syrian nationality face barriers to enrolling in public schools and accessing state healthcare. They cannot hold formal employment as adults, which pushes them into informal and exploitative labour markets. In the context of property and inheritance, a particularly acute issue in post-conflict Syria, where land and housing are central to recovery, children of Syrian mothers and foreign fathers face serious legal obstacles. Syrian Law No. 11 of 2011 imposes strict conditions on foreign nationals holding real estate, meaning a child who cannot acquire Syrian nationality may be unable to inherit their Syrian mother’s property, or may be required to dispose of it within a limited period.^[9] The discriminatory nationality law thus has economic effects, severing the intergenerational transfer of assets in mixed families.^[10]

Comparative Cases of Reform

The argument that reforming Syria’s nationality law threatens national identity or demographic stability weakens when one considers how regional states have responded to calls for reform.

Egypt amended its nationality law in 2004, granting Egyptian women the right to pass citizenship to their children born to foreign fathers.^[11] Algeria followed in 2005, eliminating paternal lineage as the exclusive basis for citizenship transmission.^[12] Morocco enacted equivalent reform in 2007.^[13] In none of these cases did reform produce demographic imbalance or erode national cohesion; rather, reform produced a reduction in statelessness, stronger child protection outcomes, and a more coherent alignment between constitutional equality guarantees and legislative practice.^[14] In comparative terms, Syria’s current law cannot be seen as a neutral inheritance. It is an active policy and an ongoing barrier to social protection in the post-conflict reconstruction period.

Potential Reform Pathways

A sustainable reform process should follow two parallel tracks. The first is constitutional, because legislative amendments without a clear constitutional foundation remain vulnerable to reversal amid political change. The Syrian transitional constitutional framework should explicitly guarantee equal citizenship transmission regardless of the parent’s sex. A formulation such as “Syrian nationality is granted to anyone born to a Syrian father or mother, in accordance with the law, without discrimination on the basis of sex, origin, or religion” would anchor the reform at the highest legal level and signal an irreversible commitment to equal citizenship. This shift also moves the question of nationality from the realm of state discretion into the realm of rights, a change that holds significant value in a country rebuilding its social contract.^[15]

The second track is legislative. Article 3 of Legislative Decree No. 276 of 1969 must be amended directly by replacing “born in or outside Syrian territory to a Syrian Arab father” with “born in or outside Syrian territory to a Syrian father or mother.” Thus, Syria would be following a regional trajectory already established by its neighbours.^[16]

Given the reality of post-conflict transition and current institutional fragility, implementation should be phased and realistic. A national committee drawing on the Ministries of Justice and Interior, women’s affairs bodies, and civil society should oversee the process. Priority should go to the most vulnerable cases: Stateless children already on Syrian soil, and children born to Syrian mothers whose fathers are missing, deceased, or of unknown nationality. A three-year window for retrospective recognition applications would allow families formed before the reform to regularize their status without overwhelming an already strained civil registry system. Technical support from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the United Nations Development Programme, both of which have existing expertise in civil identity systems, would be essential to close the gap between legal reform and administrative capacity. Syria’s international obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 7; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 24; and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Article 9^[17] provide additional frameworks that reform advocates and international partners can use to hold the transitional government accountable.

Social protection systems cannot be extended to people who do not legally exist. Access to education, healthcare, employment, property, and inheritance all flow from the prior question of who counts as a citizen. Syria’s 1969 nationality law answers that question by excluding the children of Syrian women from full legal membership in their own country.

Reforming this law and the policies that surround it constitutes a political and social need, as well as a foundational change that contributes to the process of post-conflict state-building and to addressing the needs of children who have already borne more than enough of Syria’s crisis.

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^[1] Syrian Arab Republic, Legislative Decree No. 276 of 1969 (Nationality Law); Malak Benslama-Dabdoub, “Colonial Legacies in Syrian Nationality Law and the Risk of Statelessness”, Statelessness & Citizenship Review, Vol. 3, No. 1, 28 July 2021, pp. 6–32, available at https://doi.org/10.35715/SCR3001.112; Roel Meijer, James N. Sater and Zahra R. Babar, eds., Routledge Handbook of Citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa, Routledge, 2023.

^[2] Syrian Arab Republic, Presidential Decree No. 13 of 2026 on Syrian Kurdish Citizens, 16 January 2026; Syrian Arab News Agency, “President al-Sharaa Issues Decree That Confirms Kurds as Basic Part of Syrian People”, 16 January 2026, available at https://sana.sy/en/politics/2290787/

^[3] Syrian Women’s Association, “Amendment of the Nationality Law Between Slogans and Rights”, Damascus, 2019; My Nationality, “Children of Syrian Women from Foreign Fighters: Unregistered in Their Own Country”, 2023.

^[4] Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), “Syrian Arab Republic: Country Data”, available at https://data.unhcr.org/en/country/syr

^[5] Syria Direct, “Marriage Contracts and Birth Certificates Issued by the Interim Government Pose Political Risks to Their Holders”, 2018.

^[6] Amnesty International, Aftermath: Injustice, Torture and Death in Detention in North-East Syria, April 2024, available at https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/04/syria-mass-death-torture-and-other-violations-against-people-detained-in-aftermath-of-islamic-state-defeat-new-report/

^[7] Human Rights Watch, “Northeast Syria: Camp Closures Leave Thousands Stranded”, 23 February 2026, available at https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/02/23/northeast-syria-camp-closures-leave-thousands-stranded

^[8] Asō Center for Studies, “Kurds Stripped of Syrian Nationality: The Story behind the 1962 Census in Al-Hasakah Governorate”, 2020, available at https://www.asocenter.org/node/785; Syrian Arab Republic, Presidential Decree No. 13 of 2026.

^[9] Syrian Arab Republic, Law No. 11 of 2011 on Foreign Nationals Owning Real Estate, 10 April 2011.

^[10] Hana Darwish, “Syrian Women’s Right to Pass Citizenship to Their Children: A Necessity Amid Political and Social Transformations”, Mosaada, n.d.

^[11] Arab Republic of Egypt, Law No. 154 of 2004 Amending Nationality Law No. 26 of 1975, 14 July 2004.

^[12] People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, Ordinance No. 05-01 of 27 February 2005 Amending and Supplementing Ordinance No. 70-86 of 15 December 1970 on the Algerian Nationality Code.

^[13] Kingdom of Morocco, Law No. 62-06 Amending and Supplementing the Moroccan Nationality Code, 2007.

^[14] AfriMAP and Open Society Justice Initiative, Citizenship Law in Africa: A Comparative Study, 2nd ed., Open Society Foundations, October 2010, available at https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/citizenship-africa_20101118.pdf

^[15] Robert Alexy, “Constitutional Rights and Proportionality”, Revus, No. 22, 2014, pp. 51–65, available at https://journals.openedition.org/revus/2783

^[16] Syrian Arab Republic, Legislative Decree No. 276 of 1969 (Nationality Law), Article 3.

^[17] United Nations, Convention on the Rights of the Child, 20 November 1989, Article 7, available at https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child; United Nations, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 16 December 1966, Article 24, available at https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-covenant-civil-and-political-rights; United Nations, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 18 December 1979, Article 9, available at https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-elimination-all-forms-discrimination-against-women