ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The enshrinement of Kurdish rights in Syria's upcoming constitution will be determined by the country's newly completed legislature, not the executive body, a senior Syrian official told Rudaw on Tuesday, further pointing to ongoing efforts to naturalize stateless Kurds in Syria as indicative that Damascus' commitment to Kurdish rights.
"The [Syrian] parliament has been formed and [Syrian interim] President [Ahmed al-Sharaa] also appointed Kurdish figures who have long fought for Kurdish rights in the [Syrian] parliament," Ibrahim Olabi, Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, told Rudaw's Namo Abdulla.
Sharaa in early July named 70 lawmakers to complete the country's 210-seat People's Assembly, after 140 members were elected in October.
"Now we have a parliament that's fully formed," and questions regarding the enshrinement of Kurdish rights in the Syrian constitution "will be exactly the ones that get put forward for the parliamentary process," Olabi added, noting that "the constitution will be created" through parliamentary committees and that "the government is no longer responsible for it."
The Syrian interim president in March 2025 approved a 53-article constitutional declaration centered on Islamic jurisprudence, which stipulates that Syria's president must be a Muslim and sets a five-year transitional period. It also retains the country's official name as the Syrian Arab Republic.
Kurdish parties in Syria have long rejected the interim constitution as exclusionary, demanding a redraft over its failure to uphold the diversity of Syrian society - including its political, ethnic, and religious components - which they say has deprived the country of inclusivity and national consensus.
Sharaa in January of this year issued Decree No. 13 that seeks to grant Syrian citizenship and full civil rights to stateless Kurds, overturning extraordinary laws and restrictions stemming from the controversial 1962 Baath regime census, which stripped an estimated 200,000 Kurds of their Syrian citizenship and triggered a generational legacy of statelessness that persisted for decades.
In mid-June, the Syrian interior ministry said it had completed receiving naturalization applications from stateless Kurdish citizens, adding that specialized committees had begun reviewing the submissions in preparation for implementing the necessary legal measures.
Olabi told Rudaw on Tuesday that the effort to naturalize stateless Kurds shows Damascus' efforts are more than words "on paper," describing the high number of citizenship applicants as "incredible."
"All of that should say where we stand as a government on Kurdish rights," he stressed.
Lastly, Olabi touched on Syria's recent foiling of an attempt to smuggle a massive shipment of "advanced weapons" to the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement in Lebanon from Tehran-aligned armed groups in Iraq via Syria.
"Investigations are ongoing" in that regard, the Syrian ambassador to the UN said, asserting, "We made it very clear that Syria will not be used for any proxy reasons or will not be used to destabilize the region at all," including through allowing the transit of "weapons shipments." "We are upholding that [vow]," he added.
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