Displaced from her home in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta, Umaima al-Sheikh and her family sought refuge in an abandoned house across the country in Afrin.
The traditionally Kurdish town had been emptied of its residents just weeks earlier, after a brutal Turkish-led offensive forced tens of thousands to flee.
“No one wants to live in a house that isn’t theirs, or use other people’s belongings,” Sheikh said.
Photo: AFP
After staying briefly in rebel territory elsewhere in northern Syria, the 25-year-old moved to Afrin about a month ago with her husband Firas and two young children.
“We all want to be in our own homes, our own towns, but the situation forced us to settle in a house that isn’t ours,” Sheikh said in a leafy park in the town.
“The homes we left behind are now being lived in by other people, too. This is the case for everyone in Syria, not just us,” she said.
Photo: AFP
Since war broke out in 2011, half of Syria’s population has been displaced, including more than 5 million outside the country and another 6 million internally.
Among them are rebels and civilians transferred en masse from one bombed opposition area to another under “reconciliation” agreements.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has used such deals to retake territory, prompting charges he is reshuffling the country’s demographics.
His government’s capture of Ghouta last month was sealed with the transfer of thousands of people to the rebel-held north, with many going on to Afrin.
The offensive by Turkish-backed rebels sparked a wave of accusations that Ankara was guilty of ethnic engineering, by resettling Syrian Arabs into Afrin after pushing out Syrian Kurds.
As many as 35,000 people have taken refuge in the Afrin region, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Some live in a pair of refugee camps in a rural area, but many have moved into the town’s empty and ruined homes.
Mehdi Haymur and his young son picked through the rubble and debris at the entrance of one bombed-out apartment for anything salvageable. They lifted a mismatched pair of torn, dust-covered cushions from the smashed cinderblocks and headed inside.
“We left Ghouta and lost our homes, land, and work. We were forced to leave Ghouta, and we also came here in a forced way,” Haymur said.
With help from rebel military police, he and his family have squatted in several Afrin homes, but their owners have arrived and asked them to leave.
The owner of the abandoned block where he lives now has allowed them to stay temporarily, Haymur said.
Ahmad al-Buri, 19, was displaced to Afrin from the outskirts of Ghouta’s largest town, Douma.
“This is a Turkish zone, protected from Syrian regime bombardment. That’s why I came here,” Buri said.
Rebels also helped his family find an empty home in Afrin’s Mahmudiyah District, and Buri has enlisted in the Turkish-backed police.
“If the owner of this house comes back and we have to leave, I don’t know what we’ll do. We’ll have to find another home or go to a camp,” he said.
Those camps house an estimated 10,000 people, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which also confirmed the house-squatting.
“While some are paying rent, reports of internally displaced people residing in empty houses without obtaining the permission of their owners continue to emerge,” it said.
About 135,000 of Afrin’s original residents stayed in the region as fighting continued, more than a third in the town itself, OCHA said.
Othman Khalil, a 57-year-old metal worker, refused to leave his home on Villa Street during the fight.
“There are families from Ghouta that come to our neighbourhood. We talk to each other,” he said.
“They can come into Afrin, but people originally from here cannot enter,” said Khalil, whose friends escaped the town during clashes, but have been unable to return.
A pair of Turkish-backed rebels guard one access route, checking the vehicles coming in and out.
OCHA has expressed increasing concern over “protracted displacement” from Afrin as security operations continue.
Syria’s leading Kurdish Party, the People’s Democratic Union, and the observatory have accused Ankara of seeking to change Afrin’s ethnic makeup by resettling Arab families in Kurdish homes.
“There are strangers living in my nephew’s house who won’t leave,” said Mahmoud Hassan, 58, a farmer in Afrin.
“People from Ghouta are good people, we can talk to them and there’s peace between us,” Hassan said. “But this isn’t your house, you came and lived in it, and if the owner comes back, you need to get out before he complains.”
On Saturday last week, hundreds of Syrian Kurds demonstrated in the northeastern city of Qamishli in protest at Turkey’s military presence in Afrin.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema