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.
There is nothing like the house and the land,” Hamdo told Al Jazeera. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.” 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. 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. But government decrees offer little comfort to those returning to homes that lie in ruins.
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