Mount Abdulaziz

Mount Abdulaziz or Abd al-Aziz (Arabic: جبل عبدالعزيز‎‎, Kurdish: Çiyayê Kezwan‎) is a mountain ridge located in the southwestern part of the Hasakah Governorate, some 35 km west-south-west from the center of the city of Hasakah, in northeastern Syria. The mountain extends from east to west and has a length of 85 km, a width of 15 km, and an area of 84,050 hectares. Jabal Abdulaziz consists of a series of hills and valleys whose altitudes ranges between 350 and 920 meters. The mountain has taken its name after Abdul Aziz, a descendant of Abdul-Qadir Gilani, a military commander in Saladin's army, who had once taken the mountain as a fortified place. The former name of the mountain was ʾAl-Ḥiyāl الحيال.

The mount is currently under the control of Kurdish YPG forces.^[1]

Population

In the Ottoman era, the area was transiently populated by nomadic Arab herders who wandered the arid plains between the ridge and the area of Mardin (now in Turkey). With the post-Ottoman establishment of the Syro-Turkish border and the increasing promotion of sedentary agriculture by colonial and state authorities, these tribes began to be forced to permanently settle during the French Mandate, with the first permanent settlement established in the 1950s. As of 2007, there are around twenty villages and thirty smaller farming settlements scattered around the foot of the ridge with a total population of between 13,000 and 15,000 individuals. All of the inhabitants of the area are Arabs of the Baqqarat al-Jabal tribe, save for one village of the Sayyad tribe (which has integrated with the former). It is one of the poorest areas in Syria, largely due to arid conditions and exacerbated by land use restrictions in place around the nature reserve established on the mountain. Many inhabitants have migrated to Hasakah city and the nearby town of Tall Tamer to seek better conditions.^[2]

See also

• Sinjar Mountains

References