The Armenians in Syria are Syrian citizens of either full or partial Armenian descent.
Syria and the surrounding areas have often served as a refuge for Armenians who fled from wars and persecutions such as the Armenian genocide. However, there has been an Armenian presence in the region since the Byzantine era.
Armenians (Armenian: հայեր, romanized: hayer, [hɑˈjɛɾ]) are an ethnic group indigenous to the Armenian highlands of West Asia. Armenians constitute the main demographic group in Armenia and constituted the main population of the breakaway Republic of Artsakh until their subsequent flight due to the 2023 Azerbaijani offensive. There is a large diaspora of around five million people of Armenian ancestry living outside the Republic of Armenia. The largest Armenian populations exist in Russia, the United States, France, Georgia, Iran, Germany, Ukraine, Lebanon, Brazil, Argentina, Syria, and Turkey. The present-day Armenian diaspora was formed mainly as a result of the Armenian genocide with the exceptions of Iran, former Soviet states, and parts of the Levant.
Armenian is an Indo-European language. It has two mutually intelligible spoken and written forms: Eastern Armenian, today spoken mainly in Armenia, Artsakh, Iran, and the former Soviet republics; and Western Armenian, used in the historical Western Armenia and, after the Armenian genocide, primarily in the Armenian diasporan communities. The unique Armenian alphabet was invented in 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots.
The Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), also known as Rojava, is a de facto autonomous region in northeastern Syria. It consists of self-governing sub-regions in the areas of Jazira, Euphrates, Raqqa, Tabqa, and Deir ez-Zor. The region gained its de facto autonomy in 2012 in the context of the ongoing Rojava conflict and the wider Syrian civil war, in which its official military force, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), has taken part.
While entertaining some foreign relations, the region is neither officially recognized as autonomous by the government of Syria, state, or other governments institutions except for the Catalan Parliament. Northeastern Syria is polyethnic and home to sizeable ethnic Arab, Kurdish, and Assyrian populations, with smaller communities of ethnic Turkmen, Armenians, Circassians, and Yazidis.
Armenian Americans (Armenian: ամերիկահայեր, romanized: amerikahayer) are citizens or residents of the United States who have total or partial Armenian ancestry. They form the second largest community of the Armenian diaspora after Armenians in Russia. The first major wave of Armenian immigration to the United States took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thousands of Armenians settled in the United States following the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s, the Adana massacre of 1909, and the Armenian genocide of 1915–1918 in the Ottoman Empire. Since the 1950s many Armenians from the Middle East (especially from Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Turkey) migrated to the United States as a result of political instability in the region. It accelerated in the late 1980s and has continued after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 due to socio-economic and political reasons. The Los Angeles area has the largest Armenian population in the United States.
The 2020 United States census reported that 519,001 Americans held full or partial Armenian roots either alone or combined with another ancestral origin. Various organizations and media criticize these numbers as an underestimate, proposing 800,000 to 1,500,000 Armenian Americans instead. The highest concentration of Americans of Armenian descent is in the Greater Los Angeles area, where 166,498 people have identified themselves as Armenian to the 2000 census, comprising over 40% of the 385,488 people who identified Armenian origins in the United States at the time. The city of Glendale, in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, is widely thought to be the center of Armenian American life (although many Armenians live in the aptly named "Little Armenia" neighborhood of Los Angeles).
Al-Hasakah (Arabic: ٱلْحَسَكَة, romanized: al-Ḥasaka; Kurdish: حەسەکە, romanized: Heseke; Syriac: ܚܣܝܟܐ, romanized: Hasake; officially Hasakah, is a city in northeastern Syria and the capital of the Al-Hasakah Governorate. With a 2023 estimated population of 422,445, Al-Hasakah is populated by Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians and a smaller number of Armenians and Chechens. Al-Hasakah is 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of the city of Qamishli. The Khabur River, a tributary of the Euphrates River, flows west–east through the city. The Jaghjagh River flows into the Khabur from the north at Al-Hasakah. The city (and the surrounding countryside) is controlled by the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES).
It is characterized by its fertile lands, abundant water, beautiful nature, and numerous archaeological sites. It has also witnessed a major modern urban renaissance, and numerous agricultural and industrial projects have been established around it. Over the past two decades, it has suffered from the drying up of its main river, the Khabur, which has led to the loss of much of its agricultural land, forcing many of its people to migrate internally to the interior provinces, especially the capital of Syria, Damascus, and Daraa in the south, to work in industrial factories and on agricultural lands.
Qamishli (Kurdish: Qamişlo, Arabic: القامشلي, Syriac: ܩܡܫܠܝ) is a city in northeastern Syria on the Syria–Turkey border, adjoining the city of Nusaybin in Turkey. The Jaghjagh River flows through the city. With a 2004 census population of 184,231, it is the ninth most-populous city in Syria and the second-largest in Al-Hasakah Governorate after Al-Hasakah. Qamishli has traditionally been a Christian Assyrian majority city, but is now predominantly populated by Kurds with large numbers of Arabs and Assyrians and a smaller number of Armenians. It is 680 kilometres (420 mi) northeast of Damascus.
The city is the administrative capital of the Qamishli District in Al-Hasakah Governorate, and the administrative center of Qamishli Subdistrict, consisting of 92 localities with a combined population of 232,095 in 2004. Qamishli was the de facto capital of the DAANES, until it was moved to Ayn Issa.