In 2007, when I was a professor at Damascus University, one of my closest friends was a janitor at a nearby school. This man, whom I will call Azad, was quite intelligent and had ambitious dreams for himself and his family. But we both knew that all doors were closed to him save for menial jobs such as janitor, waiter, or shoe-shiner for a simple reason: he was Kurdish.

Syria’s ruling Baath Party had systematically and mercilessly persecuted Kurds for decades before the Syrian Revolution, ever since the infamous 1962 “Hassake census” that stripped citizenship from 120,000 Kurds. Kurdish suffering increased in 1973, when Hafiz al-Assad initiated a wide campaign against Kurdish culture and ethnically cleansed thousands of Kurds to create an “Arab security belt.” This situation persisted until the eve of the Syrian Revolution, so that my friend Azad had meager job prospects because his ID card marked him as “Foreigner from Hassake,” the main Syrian Kurdish city.