In 1976, Hafez al-Assad stopped the Arab Belt plan going any further by not building any more Arab villages. The villages the government had built and the Arabs the government had moved stayed where they were. Kurdish music was again heard and official harassment became less intense. The position of Kurds in Syrian Kurdistan was related to the changing political positions of Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan. In 1977, the government changed all Kurdish language place names in the Kurd Mountains to official Arabic language names, as in other parts of Syria. The 120,000 Kurds whose citizenship the Syrian government removed in 1961 – and all their descendants – were not given official documents or passports. The government was still conscripting these Kurds into the Syrian military in the 21st century.