ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Barzani Charity Foundation (BCF) on Thursday said that nearly 3,000 Kurdish families have returned to Afrin while over a thousand settler families have left the city following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime earlier this month. The BCF, headquartered in Erbil, has two committees in Afrin that receive displaced Kurdish families returning from the Shahba region, which recently fell under the control of Turkey-backed militia groups, and register them for potential aid. Rawaj Haji, a member of the board of directors and human resources at BCF, told Rudaw that "2,876 Kurdish families, totaling 7,824 people, have returned from other areas to Afrin.” Haji added that the majority of the Kurds who are returning to Afrin have found that their homes have been occupied by the settlers, leading many of the returnees to temporarily stay with their relatives. He noted that 1,230 newly-returned families have relocated to their original areas so far. Afrin, previously under the control of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), was controlled by Ankara and the Syrian militants it supports in 2018. International organizations have recorded numerous human rights violations in Afrin since. Hundreds of thousands fled Afrin in the face of the offensive, mostly residing in the nearby Shahba region - which also fell under the same groups recently, forcing many of these internally displaced people to seek refuge in other SDF-held areas in northeast Syria (Rojava).
