ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Thousands of Arab settlers have left the Kurdish city of Afrin in northern Syria and returned to their hometowns since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, a local council member said on Monday, and over 70 thousand Kurds have returned.
“The local police in Afrin have given us the latest figures, saying that 71,000 Kurds have returned to their homes in Afrin, but it is not clear how many families they are,” Azad Osman, an Afrin local council member, told Rudaw.
Osman, however, lamented that “armed groups” have occupied Kurdish houses, demanding money as ransom for returning the properties.
“They continue to take money from the Kurds who are returning,” Osman stated. “Some groups either take no money or very little, but the al-Amshat group requires a lot of money and they now charge $1,000 to $1,500 for any family that wants to return to the area they control.”
The Suleiman Shah Brigade, also known as al-Amshat after its commander Mohammad Hussein al-Jassim (Abu Amsha), is sanctioned by the US Treasury over grave human rights violations committed in Afrin, including abductions and extortion.
Osman said they expect all Arab settlers to leave Afrin by May “because they want to return to their hometowns,” adding that thousands continue to leave the Kurdish city.
The return process to Afrin has also seen arrests. Osman said that young people returning have been detained by armed groups on charges of links to the Kurdish-led administration in Rojava.
According to Osman, an administrative decision has been made to replace armed groups in Afrin with a local police force - a decision he called “important” for the city’s Kurds.
“With the withdrawal of the armed groups, the police force will replace them,” he said.
Afrin, previously under the control of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), was seized by Turkey and its allied Syrian militia groups in a military campaign code-named Operation Olive Branch in 2018. The YPG is the backbone of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that control northeast Syria.
Hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled Afrin in the face of the offensive, mostly residing in the nearby Shahba region.
As a coalition of rebels led by the Islamist Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) were marching on Damascus and toppling Assad’s regime, Ankara-backed militants who call themselves the Syrian National Army (SNA) attacked the SDF in Shahba and took control of the area, causing a new wave of displacement from the region to other areas under Kurdish control.
Soran Hussein contributed to this report.
