Afrin: On a muddy trail in northern Syria, the war’s newest exiles are leaving. Most are Kurds, fleeing Afrin for the regime-held city of Aleppo, just over a grey horizon. Behind them, Turkish troops and Arab forces they sponsor have encircled their home city except for the squeeze point they used to flee. Ahead, Shia militants allied to the Syrian army man checkpoints deciding who can pass.
With Syria’s war ticking over into its eighth grueling year, the north of the country is once more on the move. The Kurds are bearing the brunt of the latest upheaval, fleeing their enclave near the Turkish border as a promised storming of Afrin draws near. At least 250 civilians have been killed in the bombardment of Afrin as the Turks and their proxies have advanced. Many abandoning the majority-Kurdish enclave fear they may not be allowed to return when – and if – the dust finally settles on this war without restraint. Everything appears up for grabs now: their homes, futures and even the Kurdish cause.
“We sat this out for the past seven years,” said Hero, a Kurdish resident of Afrin who had made it to Aleppo. “We bothered no one and watched the storm pass all around us. Then the Turks came for us.”
A safe haven in the tempest of Syria, Afrin had avoided the war in the rest of the north until a Turkish-led incursion into its surrounding hills seven weeks ago. Idlib and Aleppo, not far away, had been ravaged by jets and insurgency.
Afrin, meanwhile, had been a haven for refugees from elsewhere. Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Christians, Muslims, even Yazidis from Iraq, had hunkered down as war raged all around.
Even as Afrin’s civilian leaders showcased the city as a model of coexistence amid the chaos, it became a microcosm of the potent geopolitics that subsumed local allegiances. Arab-Kurdish tensions simmered in the north. But more importantly a once workable relationship between Washington and Ankara broke down – with the postwar future of Syria’s Kurds central to the schism.
Afrin’s transformation into a focal point of the Syrian conflict began on 20 January, shortly after the Pentagon announced it would raise a border militia from a Kurdish-led force it had formed in north-eastern Syria to fight the Islamic State (Isis) terror group. Washington’s alliance with the Kurds had never sat well with Ankara, which regarded their leaders as being ideological allies of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), whose insurgency in south-eastern Turkey it continues to fight.
Faced with American assurances that the alliance would be temporary, Turkey had stood by as Isis was swept from the towns and cities of north-eastern Syria, culminating in the extremists’ ousting from Raqqa late last year.
But the mooted border force was a step too far for wary officials, a sign that the Kurds – aided by their backers – would make strategic gains which could weaken Turkey’s hold on its 500-mile frontier with Syria. And so, on 20 January, Turkey’s leaders, angered by Washington but not willing to confront the Kurds where they fought alongside the Americans, instead turned their guns on Afrin, a small pocket of north-western Syria, far from the fight with Isis and with no presence of US troops.
As the siege closes in, and as Syrians of all sects and ethnicities crisscross the battered north, the war is drifting further from resolution than ever before. The plaintive cries of the global aid community remain mostly ignored, as do the demands of United Nations leaders. “Basically, anything goes,” said the western official. “There is no right or wrong any more. The international order is dying in the ruins of Syria.”
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