ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Refugees from northeast Syria (Rojava) living in the Kurdistan Region are reluctant to return home after the collapse of the regime. They are worried about how Kurds will be treated and some expressed skepticism about the intentions of the new rulers who have an Islamist background.
"Threats continue. There is no negotiation between the Kurdish parties and the interim government. We can't go back. It takes a long time,” Xebat Khidir, a refugee from Rojava now living in Domiz camp, told Rudaw.
The Kurdish administration in Rojava has had contact with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the rebel group that led the offensive that toppled the regime of Bashar al-Assad and set up an interim government, but have not yet discussed how their autonomous region and armed forces will fit into the new Syria.
Amir Rasul, another refugee in Domiz camp, expressed concern about the background of HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.
“His history is also not pure. He used to be in al-Qaeda, then joined al-Nusra, from al-Nusra he became ISIS [Islamic State]. Didn't all of them oppress the Kurds?” said Rasul.
HTS, the successor of al-Nusra Front, has its roots in al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch. It has long controlled a rebel enclave in the northwestern province of Idlib and is a designated terrorist organization by the United States and European Union.
Domiz Camp in Duhok province was opened in 2012 and at its peak sheltered about 70,000 Syrian refugees.
“Right now our situation is better than in Syria… There is no work there. We are aware of people in Syria who, if we don’t send money or people in Europe don’t send money to them, their lives are difficult,” Sulaiman Nuri, another refugee, explained.
Kurdish areas of Syria have seen widespread displacement over the course of the 13-year civil war.
A study conducted by the European Center for Kurdish Studies with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office through the Institute for Foreign Relations (IFA) looked at 13 cities and 880 villages using official Syrian government data for the year 2010, the last year before the start of the war, and compared it with 2023 data collected by an unnamed organization to show the impact of the war on the populations of those areas.
Cities selected for the study included Qamishli in northeast Syria, and Kobane and Jindires in northern Syria, all cities with Kurdish populations.
The population in the selected cities and villages was 1,287,161 million in 2010. By 2023, however, 549,661 people had fled, around 42.7 of the population. No detailed information about the ethnicities of the people was available.
The study also noted that the data does not give a full picture because some cities such as Afrin were not included due to lack of information. Large numbers of Kurds fled Afrin when it was invaded by Turkey and Turkish-backed Syrian proxies in 2018.
