Hundreds of displaced residents returned Monday to an Aleppo neighborhood in northern Syria after days of intense fighting between government forces and Kurdish fighters, according to the Associated Press.
The clashes broke out on Jan. 6 in the predominantly Kurdish neighborhoods of Achrafieh, Sheikh Maqsoud and Bani Zeid after the government and the Syrian Democratic Forces, the main Kurdish-led force in the country, failed to make progress on implementing a deal that would merge the SDF into the national army. AP said security forces captured the three neighborhoods.
AP reported that the fighting killed at least 23 people and displaced tens of thousands. On Monday, armed security forces stood guard in Achrafieh as traffic moved normally through the streets, and buses carried displaced families back to the neighborhood. Many shops had reopened, though residents complained about electricity cuts.
Jamal al-Youssef, an Arab resident, said he fled with his family for about four days because of the fighting. AP reported that he welcomed the departure of the Kurdish fighters and the government’s exertion of control over the neighborhood, adding that he said there was no issue between Arab and Kurdish civilians in the area. “We have three or four Kurdish families in my building and we don’t feel there’s any difference between us,” he said.
AP said the majority of some 148,000 displaced people had fled to the district of Afrin in the northwest of Aleppo province. Masoud Battal, director of the Afrin region for the Syrian government, said about 10 buses carrying 700 families returned to Achrafieh on Monday. Mohammed Sheikho, who was on one of the buses, said: “I left Achrafieh five days ago. I was in Afrin and now we’re returning to our homes, thank God.”
Meanwhile, crews in Sheikh Maqsoud worked to remove leftover explosives and tow away destroyed vehicles blocking roads, AP said. Security forces were also inspecting tunnels under the neighborhood that appeared to have been used by fighters.
AP said some factions in the new Syrian army, formed after the ouster of former President Bashar Assad in a rebel offensive in December 2024, were previously Turkey-backed insurgent groups with a long history of clashing with Kurdish forces. It also said the SDF has for years been the main U.S. partner in Syria in fighting the Islamic State group, while Turkey considers the SDF a terrorist organization because of its association with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.
AP said last week’s fighting between the two sides was the most intense since the fall of Assad to insurgents in December 2024, with at least 23 people killed in five days of clashes amid shelling and drone strikes. AP reported that hundreds of Kurdish fighters evacuated from the contested area in Aleppo to northeastern Syria under a deal reached between the SDF and government authorities, but that tensions remained high afterward.
Syria’s state-run news agency SANA reported Monday evening that the Syrian army sent reinforcements to the deployment line east of Aleppo after seeing a buildup of SDF forces in the eastern Aleppo countryside near the towns of Maskana and Deir Hafer. The SDF responded in a statement saying that “there are no military movements or troop buildups by our forces in the aforementioned areas, and that all circulating claims are entirely unfounded,” and it accused the government of an “attempt to manufacture tension and create pretexts for escalation.”