Badea’a still feels sorry for her four sons. They couldn’t pursue their education, nor could they fulfil their dreams and ambitions, because they are stateless Syrian Kurds, specifically from the so-called maktumeen[1].
Badea’a Farhan Hasan was born in the city of Qamishli/Qamishlo in 1948. She is married with four children. As a result of the special census carried out by the Syrian government in 1962, her family was divided, some becoming citizens and others, maktumeen, which made her face several difficulties as she told STJ researcher who interviewed her on March 2018:
“My husband and I are from the same family, but he is maktum and I am a citizen, as his name came under the maktumeen by the census decree. He didn’t care much then, since we had no kids. However, when my first daughter was born, in the early 1980’s, we started having serious difficulties, so I asked my brother, who was a member of The People’s Council at the time, to resolve our legal status but he couldn’t do that. I can’t forget once when my daughter returned from school weeping, because the headmaster kicked her out of school arguing that her father is a stateless, and said that those like her shouldn’t come to school, they should stay home and do the housework instead. I went to the headmaster and tried to explain my daughter’s legal status, but he insisted and reiterated that my daughter was unregistered. Then when he finished and before I left I said to him in Kurdish: “If I had a gun now, I’d blow your head, and I wouldn’t mind spending the rest of my life in prison.”