The top-level domain (TLD) you’re asking about, XN—OGBPF8FL (.سورية in Arabic) is the Internet country code TLD for Syria. This TLD is presented in the Punycode encoding format used to convert Unicode characters to ASCII, which is supported by the International Domain Name system (IDN). According to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the steward of global internet, XN—OGBPF8FL was introduced in 2011.
Countries and territories generally have their TLDs based on their ISO 3166-1 code, which, for Syria, is SY. However, ICANN introduced a program of Internationalized TLDs (ITLDs) to reflect the language and script of the various countries and territories worldwide. This was particularly important for countries that use non-Latin scripts. Syria, in which the official language is Arabic, was one of the countries to get a TLD (.سورية). So, the domain XN—OGBPF8FL represents the TLD of Syria in the actual Arabic script.
Each IDN TLD is displayed in the end-user application, such as a web browser, in its local language script. However, since the Domain Name System, which forms the infrastructure of the Internet, only understands ASCII characters, the Unicode representation of the TLD is converted into an ASCII compatible encoding (ACE) representation that begins with ‘XN—’. Thus, .سورية turns into XN—OGBPF8FL.
One can find examples of websites that use this TLD to target the Arabic speaking population in Syria, for instance, the website of the Presidency of the Syrian Arab Republic http://www.presidency.xn—ogbpf8fl/. This site provides information in Arabic related to the president, the constitution, news, and more. The website for Syria’s Ministry of Tourism also utilizes this TLD http://syriatourism.xn—ogbpf8fl/ to supply travel and tourism information. These are just a few examples of how the .سورية (XN—OGBPF8FL) TLD is being employed to reach specific demographics and cater to non-English, specifically Arabic, Internet users.
Sources:
1. IANA — .xn—ogbpf8fl Domain Delegation Data (https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/xn—ogbpf8fl.html)
2. ICANN | Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Program (https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/idn-2012-02-25-en)
3. Wikipedia — List of Internet top-level domains (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains)
4. RFC 5992 – Internationalized Domain Names Registration and Administration Guidelines for European Languages Using Cyrillic (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5992)
