Even though ‘Syria’ is associated today with large number of refugees and internally displaced, the contemporary flight of Syrian refugees comes well a century after the region had witnessed massive displacement and upheaval in the aftermath of the First World War. Back then, however, Syria was a refugee hosting country instead of one that generated them, as it became home for thousands of Ottoman Armenians, Assyrians and Kurds. Crucially, the settlement of these refugees and migrants across the Levant took place at a critical historical juncture when a Syrian state was formed under the French tutelage in the midst of the frustrated attempts to create an independent Arab state as promised by the Allied Powers during the war. Inevitably, the incoming refugees and the policies that regulated their resettlement contributed either directly or indirectly to the formation of the Syrian state. That being the case, refugees have largely been studied from a state-centred perspective, often reduced to mere historical outcomes or victims with no agency on their own. Drawing from primary source material from the French archives, as well as Arabic and Armenian newspapers, this paper will examine Armenian refugees amidst the Syrian struggles to define statehood under the French tutelage. The paper will examine how the French sought to settle the refugees along the Syrian-Turkish border, which raised concerns among Syrian nationalists of a French-Armenian conspiracy to establish an Armenian ‘national home’ in northern Syria. In response, a considerable portion of these refugees expressed belonging to another homeland - the newly established Soviet Armenia, waiting for an opportunity to be ‘repatriated’. In reality, however, none of them had any previous ties with the claimed homeland. Soviet Armenia itself was quick to make claims over these refugees for its own purposes; namely enhancing Soviet reputation abroad, using their labor and spreading communist propaganda. This paper examines how the increased mobility across the Turkish-Syrian border and the settlement of Armenian refugees along the border contributed to the state formation processes in Syria, delimitation of new boundaries and imagining of new territorialities.