An unexpected welcome: Syrian Kurds return to their homes in Afrin

Afrin, Syria – When Dilshad Hamdo walked into the home his father built 30 years ago, there was no place to sit. The stone walls were intact, but the rooms had been stripped bare. Yet, standing in the empty space, there was still a strong sense of relief at being back home.

“I have a lot of memories in this house with my extended family. There is nothing like the house and the land,” Hamdo told Al Jazeera.

Recommended Stories

• list 1 of 4Syria’s president appoints ex-commander of Kurdish-led SDF as advisor
• list 2 of 4As SDF disband in Syria, Kurds ponder how to secure their rights
• list 3 of 4Syria abolishes al-Assad-era ‘terrorism’ court as Kurdish tensions flare
• list 4 of 4Syrian army offensive overjoys some, leaves others with ‘existential’ fear

Hamdo fled Afrin as a young man in early 2018, during a Turkish-led military offensive, dubbed “Operation Olive Branch”, against the Kurdish-dominated People’s Protection Units (YPG) of the Syrian Democratic Forces.

In the ensuing chaos, tens of thousands of Syrian Kurds were displaced. Vacant properties across Afrin were soon occupied by other displaced Syrians, most of them Arabs fleeing the intense Syrian government bombardments of opposition areas in Homs and Damascus.

For the Hamdos, exile meant drifting ever eastwards – from Aleppo to Raqqa of Syria, and finally to a camp for the displaced in Qamishli.

“We heard that there are people returning to Afrin, and that there is registration in order to return,” Hamdo recalled. “We told them we want to return to our land. We cannot live here. Because a person can only rest in his house and his land, and we suffered greatly outside our land.”

Following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024, Syria’s newly formed transitional government announced it would facilitate the safe return of those who had fled Afrin in 2018.

Internal security forces assisted the return of hundreds of Syrian Kurdish families from Hasakah to Afrin in April and May.

A man walks through a heavily damaged hospital in the city of Afrin, Syria, Sunday, June 13, 2021 [Ghaith Alsayed/AP]

Hamdo’s father travelled ahead to check on their property, only to find a displaced family from Homs living inside. Rather than a confrontation, the encounter between the two displaced families ended in a quiet negotiation.

“The people who were living in our house asked for a period of several months until they left. After several months, we paid them 300 American dollars so they would leave the house, travel money so they could return to Homs, and we got our house,” he said.

“After Syria was liberated, we wanted to return to our land. We do not see any distinction between the Arab and the Kurd, and all of us are one people. And we only want peace and safety.”

Rebuilding trust

The transitional government in Damascus is heavily promoting the return of families such as the Hamdos.

Khayro Dawood, the director of the Afrin region, said the state’s priority is to “completely stop the Syrian bleeding” by reaching out to those languishing in camps.

“The state was trying to understand and to receive with an open heart,” Dawood told Al Jazeera, describing government delegations sent to camps in the northeast. “Our visit to the Hasakah region gave a positive impression in the hearts of the people there … and this visit had a positive result in rebuilding trust anew.”

What started as a trial run of 400 families has grown into a wave of roughly 12,000 families returning to Afrin via state-organised convoys.

Dawood pointed to the implementation of Decree 13 – a transitional law recognising the cultural and political rights of Syria’s Kurdish community – as proof of a new era between Arabs and Kurds in Syria.

In this January 28, 2018 file photo, a soldier waves a Turkish flag as Turkish troops secure Bursayah hill, which separates the Kurdish-held enclave of Afrin from the Turkiye-controlled town of Azaz, Syria [AP Photo]

‘A house for human beings’

But government decrees offer little comfort to those returning to homes that lie in ruins.

Zeina Sido boarded one of the recent state-sponsored convoys back to Afrin. “It was a wonderful feeling when they told us, ‘Pack your belongings; you will return to your homes,'” she recalled. “Their treatment was excellent.”

That joy vanished the moment she arrived at her property. Her four-room house had been gutted, looted, and repurposed.

“We went and saw our house completely destroyed,” Sido said. “We found it had turned into a house for sheep. This house was for a human being and it should not turn into a house for animals. Did they not take into consideration that the people of these houses would return to them?”

With no money to rebuild, Sido now lives in a nearby displacement camp – a facility recently vacated by those fleeing the former regime, which is now filling up again with Afrin’s native residents.

“Every time we are able to establish something, we are forced into displacement and we repeat the cycle,” she said,

While Sido has bitter feelings about returning home to find nothing as it was, being surrounded by the wreckage of her old life, she refuses to leave the region again.

“My wish is that we establish our family in our house and in our land, and this is a beautiful feeling that we are able to do that,” Sido said. “I still have hope to do that. Were it not for hope, we would not have been able to return here in the first place.”