A YELLOWING scrap of paper bearing a black-and-white photograph and protected by transparent tape is the only document proving that Massoud Omar exists.

Mr Omar is one of about 25,000 Kurds in Syria classified as maktoumeen — “unregistered”. His house and clothes shop are held in other people’s names because he cannot own property. He cannot travel abroad, his marriage is illegal under Syrian law and officially his four children do not exist.

Another 225,000 of Syria’s 1.7 million Kurds are categorised as “foreigners”, holding only a red identity card for domestic travel.

But the prospect of war in neighbouring Iraq appears to have spurred the Syrian authorities to reassess their 40-year suppression of the Kurds’ identity. Damascus fears that any automony granted to northern Iraq’s Kurds after the removal of President Saddam Hussein could prompt their Syrian brethren to agitate for self-rule in their adjacent homeland of northeast Syria. One Western diplomat in Damascus des-cribed the Kurdish question as a “timebomb”.

The Syrian regime’s concerns are reinforced by the fact that the Kurds populate the country’s wealthiest province, source of most of Syria’s oil and gas. The Kurds occupy the flat fertile plain between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, where the endlessly level skyline is broken only by villages of mud-plastered houses that merge into the landscape. Tractors and lorries laden with bulging sacks of soft white cotton clog arrow-straight roads. The district is Syria’s largest cotton-growing area and provides about half the country’s annual grain yield of four million tonnes.

Syria’s youthful President al-Assad recently paid a rare visit to Hasake, the principal town in the area, in an apparent attempt to appease the disenfranchised Kurds.

“The message from the President is: ‘Yes, we will look into your problems, but don’t use this as a card to press for more,’ ” a Damascus-based analyst said.

Most Kurds say that their goal is citizenship, not autonomy. “Our problem is very different from that of the Kurds in Iraq,” Ahmad Barakat, of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Progressive Party, said. “Their aim is to get a state of their own. But in Syria, we just want our culture and freedom as Syrian nationals.”

The repression of the Kurds began in 1962 when a controversial census stripped 120,000 Kurdish Syrians of their citizenship overnight. Their offspring were classified either as “foreigners” or maktoumeen. Damascus justified the measure as an attempt to differentiate between Syrian Kurds and illegal Kurdish immigrants who had crossed the border from Turkey. Later thousands of Arabs were resettled on confiscated Kurdish property in a strip along Syria’s border with Turkey.

Their land gone, many Kurds left their homes to find menial labour in Aleppo or Damascus. Others have tried to emigrate illegally to Europe.

Some restrictions were eased in 1970 when Hafez al-Assad, the former Syrian President, assumed power. Kurds can speak their language in public, for example.

In the residential outskirts of the Kurdish-populated town of Qamishly, children run through the narrow dusty streets. Women, wearing traditional Kurdish robes and headscarves, sit chopping vegetables. Mounds of knee-deep mud and straw are paddled by barefoot men before being smeared on the flat roofs of houses as insulation against freezing winter nights ahead.

But despite the pastoral scene, residents say that the security presence remains powerful in Qamishly, as well as in other Kurdish-populated towns and villages. “We’re afraid to speak to people, afraid to speak in the streets. We’re always worried that someone is listening to us,” Mr Omar said.

After 40 years of waiting, the Kurds are reluctant to pin too much hope on the possibility that an Iraqi war will improve their status. “We have to build our lives on reality, not on dreams,” Mr Barakat said.

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