Syrian Studies Association Newsletter 16.1 (2011) ة رابط نشرث السوريةسا ة الدرا Scholarship on the Kurds in Syria: A History and State of the Art Assessment Jordi Tejel Northern Syria with major Kurdish population centers of the northeast corner of the country shaded in. From Jordi Tejel, Syria's Kurds: History, Politics and Society (Routledge, 2009). The Syrian Kurds are rarely featured in the media. This is also true of academic research dedicated to Syria. Indeed, the Kurdish factor in Syria has been a marginal issue in classic works about the French Mandate in the Levant (Longrigg 1958; Khoury 1987) and the period of independence (Raymond 1980; Hopwood 1988). Moreover, most works on the Kurdish question focus on the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Iraq and, to a lesser degree, Iran. Therefore, for a long period, the Kurdish features in Syria have remained at the margins of social sciences. Despite increasing interest in the Kurdish question in Syria since the riots of 2004 in Qamishli, there remains a dearth of anthropological, historical and political perspectives on the subject. Many factors are responsible for these gaps in information. In the first place, the emerging academic research on Kurds in Syria was directly related to the French Mandate (1920–46) in the Levant. When the French occupied Damascus in 1920, the colonial power established diverse institutions that were more or less linked with the Serai. One of these institutions was the French Institute in Damascus (FID), founded in 1922. 1 In its beginnings, the FID resembled the classic Orientalist institutes, considered by the critics as ―obsolete.‖ When Robert Montagne became the director of the FID in 1930, he tried to obtain scientific and financial autonomy for the FID from the mandatory authorities. Moreover, he gave a prominence to contemporary dynamics of the Syrian society in order to assure the viability of a modern state (Métral 2004: 217–34). Accordingly, he asked Pierre Rondot and Roger Lescot, two officers but also young scholars, to undertake contemporary studies on Kurds and other Syrian minorities. 1 The first name of the institute was Institut d‘art et d‘archéologie. See Avez 1993; Trégan 2004: 235–47.