Afrin, Syria

Overview

Afrin names both a city and the surrounding district in northwestern Syria. It is a historically Kurdish area of Syrian Kurdistan; the district was nearly entirely Kurdish before proposals to enlarge its autonomous canton into neighboring areas. Afrin, Kobani and Qamishli were three major population centers from which the Kurdish Democratic Union Party expanded its administration during the Syrian civil war. The city became the focus of a Turkish offensive in 2018, remained under Turkish-backed Syrian National Army factions for years, and saw forces dispatched by Damascus enter on February 6, 2025.

Afrin’s modern history reflects overlapping struggles over Kurdish self-government, Turkey’s southern border, the campaign against the Islamic State, and control of northern Syria after the collapse of Assad regime authority in parts of the country. Turkish intervention drove large numbers of Kurds from their homes. The conduct of Turkish-backed factions subsequently made property rights, detention and the safety of Kurdish and Yazidi residents central questions in the district. These issues remained prominent when Syria’s new security forces arrived in 2025.

Geography

The Afrin pocket lies near Syria’s border with Turkey, west of the Euphrates and apart from the principal territory that the Democratic Union Party came to control farther east. Its separation made the land between Afrin and Kobani strategically important. From July 2012, the pocket was cut off from other Democratic Union Party territory and bordered by Turkey and its Syrian allies. An account of the 2018 crisis described the pocket as covering approximately 1,556 square miles. In February 2016, Kurdish forces captured an additional strip adjoining it during operations supported by Russian airstrikes.

The Democratic Union Party sought a connection between its Kobani and Afrin cantons and the Kurdish district of Sheikh Maqsoud in Aleppo. Proposed maps of an enlarged Afrin canton extended toward Azaz, Jarabulus and parts of al-Bab and Manbij. Such an expansion would have changed the canton’s population: Kurds were projected to form about 30 percent of the proposed larger area, compared with their overwhelming share of Afrin district before expansion. For Turkey, Kurdish control of the intervening territory raised the prospect of a continuous belt along its southern border.

Modern history

In July 2012, during the Syrian civil war, the Assad regime ceded the Afrin pocket and other border areas to the Kurdish Democratic Union Party. Kurdish forces then administered Afrin separately from their areas farther east. Turkish forces began shelling Democratic Union Party positions in Syria in 2014. By June 2015, Ankara had identified a Kurdish move west of the Euphrates as a trigger for stronger military action. Kurdish gains around Tall Rifaat in February 2016 heightened Turkish concern that Afrin might expand eastward toward Azaz and connect with the other cantons.

Turkey launched Operation Euphrates Shield in August 2016 to prevent Democratic Union Party territory east of the Euphrates from joining Afrin. The operation formed part of a series of major Turkish cross-border interventions in Syria in 2016, 2018 and 2019, undertaken over Damascus’s objections. Turkey viewed the Democratic Union Party’s armed wing, the People’s Defense Units, or YPG, as linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Kurdish territorial gains, Turkey’s border policy and the United States’ military cooperation with Kurdish-led forces brought those interests into increasingly direct conflict.

On January 20, 2018, Turkey launched Operation Olive Branch against Kurdish forces in Afrin. Its objectives were to remove the YPG from Turkey’s southern border and end Kurdish autonomous administration in the pocket. Turkish forces fought alongside Syrian rebel factions and captured Afrin city by March 18, 2018. Turkey’s campaign targeted a Kurdish-held area, rather than an Islamic State stronghold. After Afrin fell, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan threatened further operations against Kurdish forces around Manbij, Kobani and Sinjar.

The offensive displaced much of Afrin’s Kurdish population. One estimate put the number of Kurds driven from the area at 160,000; another described roughly 200,000 people, more than half of Afrin’s Kurdish population, as having left after the offensive. Some displaced Kurds lived in camps near Tall Rifaat in the Aleppo area. The loss of Afrin was part of a wider reversal for Kurdish-led autonomous administration, which also lost Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ain. Turkish-backed Syrian National Army factions held Afrin for years after the 2018 campaign, until Damascus began asserting authority there in February 2025.

Security

Operation Olive Branch strained relations between Turkey and the United States. Washington continued supporting the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in their fight against the Islamic State in eastern Syria while withholding support from Kurdish forces in Afrin. In January 2018, President Donald Trump urged Erdoğan to limit the operation and avoid harm to civilians and United States personnel. Fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces moved from the lower Euphrates Valley toward Afrin, slowing their campaign against the Islamic State and giving the group an opportunity to increase guerrilla activity there. The diversion demonstrated a strategic cost of the Afrin offensive beyond the district itself.

Turkey’s campaign also brought pressure on dissent at home. Turkish authorities detained more than 300 people, including opposition politicians, over social-media criticism of the offensive. After the Turkish Medical Association criticized the operation, authorities detained its chair and ten other senior members. These arrests accompanied a military campaign whose stated aim was to clear Kurdish armed forces from Afrin.

Turkish-backed Syrian opposition factions looted and confiscated homes belonging to Kurdish residents after Afrin’s capture. In subsequent years, Turkish-supported armed groups committed abuses in and around the district, including torture, rape, looting and seizure of private property, particularly in Kurdish and Yazidi areas. Accounts of abuses against Yazidis in northern Syria also described the destruction or desecration of shrines and pressure on Yazidi children to adopt Islam. Armed-faction rule therefore affected residents through both direct violence and the loss of homes, property and religious security.

Afrin also figured in the rivalry between Turkey and the Iranian regime over Syria’s future. The Iranian regime had no soldiers stationed in Afrin during Turkey’s 2018 operation, but opposed a Turkish presence that could threaten Assad’s position and its route toward the Mediterranean. As the operation began, the regime sent its deputy foreign minister to Moscow to press Russia to stop it. For Israel, some Turkish presence in northern Syria could constrain the Iranian regime’s influence. At the same time, a clash between Turkish and United States forces risked weakening American influence in northeastern Syria and efforts to block the regime’s proposed corridor from Tehran to the Mediterranean. Afrin thus mattered to Israeli security through its effect on the wider contest over Iranian power in Syria.

Present day

Factional fighting later changed Afrin’s local balance of power. A crisis among Turkish-backed groups followed the killing of activist Abu Ghanoum and his pregnant wife after he investigated the al-Hamza brigade’s involvement in the drug trade. Disputes over that trade and control of northern territory opened the way for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to intervene. The Sultan Suleiman Shah Division sought help from the group’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jawlani. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham entered Afrin from al-Basoota in the south and Deir al-Balout in the southwest, then captured the district, including Afrin city.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s advance threatened Azaz, where the Third Corps, composed largely of al-Jabha al-Shamiya factions, resisted it. On October 14, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the Third Corps signed a ceasefire agreement. The terms allowed al-Jabha al-Shamiya to return to its Afrin bases and pursue a shared governing structure. The episode exposed divisions among Turkish-backed factions and left residents facing another change in the armed groups exercising local power.

A further change began after a January 29, 2025 meeting in Damascus at which armed groups agreed to dissolve into a unified security structure and Ahmed al-Sharaa became Syria’s transitional president. On February 6, 2025, a convoy of about 60 vehicles carrying personnel from Syria’s General Security Department entered Afrin. The deployment marked the beginning of a shift from Syrian National Army factional control toward authority exercised by Damascus. Residents used the occasion to call for stronger law enforcement and an end to local detentions and armed-faction violence. The arrival of state security forces changed the district’s formal direction of governance, while those demands showed the immediate importance of safety and accountability to its inhabitants.