During the interwar period, Syria became home to a number of Armenian and Assyrian communities who had been displaced by Ottoman massacres and the exigencies of the First World War. These communities, many of whom were housed in refugee camps, were special targets for humanitarian and political efforts coming out of Europe and the United States; they also became especially closely tied to diaspora communities who were determined to use the refugees’ plight to spearhead campaigns for some version of Armenian and Assyrian national sovereignty. This paper explores the ways in which these refugee camps became new kinds of urban spaces in interwar Syria, representing blocs of unassimilable “minorities” whose primary relationship was not with the Syrian state but with international organizations like the League of Nations and with diaspora groups. These camps soon became spaces within which international organizations operated as state-like actors, determining the layout of the physical space, running local bureaucracies, and distributing goods and services. At the same time, the experiences of these refugee communities provided a foundation for diaspora groups to create nationalist and separatist political narratives for international distribution. The transnational nature of Assyrian and Armenian refugee communities, combined with the semi-permanent nature of their camp dwellings in Syria and their dependence on entities outside Syria for their maintenance, lent these spaces a sense of separation from the emerging urban and rural landscapes of the new Syrian mandate state. Refugee camps thus contributed substantially to the process of defining not only communities but spaces as minoritized, and helped to further strands of Syrian and Arab nationalism that were coming to view minorities as an entry point for Western intervention. The interwar history of Assyrian and Armenian refugee camps in Syria, and particularly the entrance of diasporas into their self-definition, thus helps to illuminate the emergence of Syria as a highly fragmented polity in the mandate period.