Qamishli

Overview

Qamishli is a city in northeastern Syria, on the border with Turkey. It lies in Hasakah Governorate and is one of the principal urban centers of Syrian Kurdistan. Its population includes Kurds, Arabs and communities descended from Armenian and Syriac settlers. Qamishli was predominantly Christian before migration from the surrounding countryside changed its size and composition. Its position beside Turkey, its role in the grain-producing Jazira plain and its importance to Kurdish political movements have shaped the city’s modern history.

During the Syrian civil war, Qamishli became an administrative center for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), while forces of Bashar al-Assad’s regime retained positions in the city. Military, security and civilian offices operated alongside this divided control. The city and its airport also became important to Russian operations, while the American-led coalition maintained bases in the surrounding area. Attacks by the Islamic State, Turkish airstrikes and the activity of Iranian-backed militias made Qamishli a focal point of the wider struggle over northeastern Syria.

Geography

Qamishli stands at Syria’s northern edge, directly beside the Turkish border, in Hasakah Governorate. It belongs to Jazira, the northeastern agricultural area associated with grain and cotton production. The city’s location connects its commercial history to cross-border politics: developments in Turkey and Iraq have repeatedly affected security in Qamishli. Afrin, Kobani and Qamishli were three major Kurdish population centers from which the Democratic Union Party (PYD) expanded its influence.

Qamishli airport lies southwest of the city. Russia maintained an army base there and used the airport to support joint patrols with Turkey under a 2019 border agreement. The airport later became the visible center of Russia’s withdrawal from Qamishli. Its military role reflected the city’s proximity both to the Turkish border and to areas where the SDF, Syrian government forces and the American-led coalition operated.

Jewish history

Qamishli had a small community of Jews among its other religious and ethnic communities. A historical count recorded 300 Jews in the city among approximately 4,000 Jews remaining in Syria. Qamishli’s Jews lived among Muslim Kurds who were generally not hostile to them, but they were also exposed to the persecution faced by Syrian Jews elsewhere in the country.

After the 1965 public hanging in Damascus of Israeli intelligence agent Eli Cohen, attacks on Syrian Jews intensified. During and after the 1967 Six-Day War, Jews were arrested and assaulted, and Jews were murdered in Damascus, Aleppo and Qamishli. Strict censorship prevented precise details of the Qamishli murders from becoming known. The violence formed part of the broader deterioration in the security and prospects of Syria’s Jewish communities, thousands of whose members had already left for Israel after 1948.

Modern history

Qamishli’s modern development followed the First World War and the dissolution of Ottoman rule. Armenian and Syriac people who had fled Turkey settled in the area under French authorities. French settlement policy sought in part to limit Mustafa Kemal’s territorial claims in northern Syria. The new communities established farms and helped develop a city with a substantial Christian population and a commercial life tied to the surrounding plain.

By the 1950s, Qamishli was the economic center of Jazira’s grain- and cotton-producing area. Merchants, textile traders and millers traveled from Aleppo to purchase crops. The city’s hotels and businesses served this trade. Later rural migration transformed Qamishli: its population increased tenfold before 1997, and the earlier predominance of Christian residents gave way to a more varied urban population.

State policy also shaped the countryside around Qamishli. In 1970, Hafez al-Assad blocked distribution of expropriated land in Hasakah Governorate to prevent the formation of a small Kurdish landowning class. Kurdish grievances over citizenship, land and political rights persisted. In 2004, clashes at a Qamishli football match and the security forces’ use of live fire sparked Kurdish unrest that spread beyond the city. The authorities sent troops into Kurdish towns and arrested thousands of people. The episode became a defining event in the modern political history of Syria’s Kurds.

After the civil war began in 2011, the PYD and its militia, the People’s Defense Units (YPG), emerged as leading forces in northeastern Syria. The PYD is affiliated with Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party. From 2012, Assad’s regime maintained a stronghold in Qamishli through alignment with the PYD, even as other Kurdish parties joined the wider opposition to Assad. The PYD and YPG subsequently led the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. Qamishli served as an SDF administrative center, with military, security and civilian offices, while regime positions remained in the city. Al-Magawir also operated as a counterweight to the PYD in Hasakah and Qamishli.

Security

The Islamic State carried out major attacks in Qamishli. In July 2016, an Islamic State suicide bomber detonated a truck bomb in the western part of the city, killing 44 people and wounding 140. The blast destroyed apartments, damaged infrastructure and left a large crater. On June 17, 2019, another Islamic State suicide bomber detonated a car bomb near the Kurdish internal security headquarters after failing to enter it. Seven civilians were wounded, including three women and a child. On October 23, 2019, a parked vehicle exploded near an SDF headquarters in central Qamishli, killing or wounding several SDF fighters; accounts differed on how the explosive device was attached to the vehicle. The Islamic State remained active south of Qamishli in 2023, when Hasakah Province was a major site of its attacks.

Divided control created further security risks. Iranian-backed militias exploited the overlap between Assad regime and SDF positions to broaden their influence in Qamishli. New weapons arrived as the militias shifted attacks toward SDF forces and local Arabs in northeastern Syria. American support for the SDF did not remove this opening: PYD and YPG cooperation with Assad’s regime coexisted with American-led coalition bases near Qamishli and with Iranian-backed activity in the same area.

Security forces under SDF authority were also implicated in abuses against civilians. On February 26, 2023, SDF personnel detained Kurdish journalist Goran Azm, two other men and a 15-year-old boy with cancer in a Qamishli market without disclosing their whereabouts. Khader al-Sattam was tortured to death in Qamishli’s Alaya prison four months after his arrest. These cases were part of wider reporting on detention without charge and the detention of journalists and other civilians in SDF-held areas.

From December 23 to 27, 2023, Turkey struck Qamishli and other northeastern Syrian cities following Kurdistan Workers’ Party attacks on Turkish military outposts in Iraq. The airstrikes concentrated around Hasakah, Kobani and Qamishli. Across those affected cities, they killed 10 civilians and damaged civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and factories. The reported casualty and damage figures cover the wider strike area, rather than Qamishli alone.

Present day

The fall of Assad’s regime changed the military balance around Qamishli. Russia initially retained its base at Qamishli airport while reducing positions elsewhere in Syria. In January 2026, forces of President Ahmed al-Sharaa fought the SDF for control of northeastern Syria. A January 20 ceasefire gave Damascus control of Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa Governorates but left the status of Hasakah Governorate, including Qamishli, for later negotiations.

Russia began withdrawing from Qamishli during that period. Footage aired on January 26 showed Russian military equipment being loaded onto an Il-76 transport aircraft at the airport. The withdrawal marked a change in the city’s role as a Russian military foothold. Subsequent negotiations between Damascus and the SDF led to Syrian government security personnel entering Hasakah city on February 2 and Qamishli on February 3, 2026. Qamishli’s recent history thus runs from shared Assad regime and PYD control through the January ceasefire and the first deployment of the new Syrian government’s security forces into the city.