ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Despite a recent amnesty issued by the authorities in Afrin, around 200 Kurds remain in prisons, a Kurdish National Council (ENKS/KNC) official said on Monday, noting that over 2,000 families have returned to the Kurdish city since the start of the recent escalations in Syria.
As the Syrian rebels, led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), entered the capital Damascus, announcing the collapse of the Bashar al-Assad regime, the rebels released inmates of the country’s most notorious prisons. For its part, the Turkey-backed Syrian interim government that governs over Afrin issued a general amnesty.
“Nobody knows why the released prisoners were jailed in the first place, so we demanded to release any Kurd from Afrin and the surrounding areas, without any questioning,” Ahmed Hassan, the head of the ENKS local council told Rudaw.
Hassan noted that despite the general amnesty, some prisoners remain in the jails.
“We request that the prisons are emptied of prisoners. According to our information, around 200 Kurds have yet to be freed,” he said.
Hassan said that they have helped over 2,000 families from Aleppo, Shahba, and Tal Tamir to return to Afrin with the help of the Barzani Charity Foundation (BCF), since the start of the recent escalation in Syria.
Hassan said that many of the returning families found that their houses were occupied by Arab settlers, adding that “the returnees now live with their relatives that have a house in the area.”
The Arabs who have settled in Afrin are from the areas of Aleppo, Idlib, Hama, Homs, and Deir ez-Zor, according to Hassan, who said that the settlers also desire returning to their homes.
“The Arabs also have their own homes and want to go back. When their return in phases begins, then the people of Afrin will go back to their houses,” Hassan said.
The ENKS official noted that they have no statistics on how many Arabs have returned to their hometowns and cities, but that ‘’the return has begun’’.
Hassan urged the people of Afrin, who have been displaced in Syria or sought refuge in Europe, to return home to “weaken the demographic change that had taken place.”
Many Kurdish families fled Afrin following the occupation of the city in 2018, after Turkey launched Operation Olive Branch, eliminating the Kurdish forces that once controlled the area.
International organizations have recorded numerous human rights violations in Afrin since 2018.
“Kurdish residents have borne the brunt of the abuses due to their perceived ties to Kurdish-led forces that control vast swathes of northeast Syria,” Human Rights Watch said in February, referring to areas under the control of Ankara-backed groups, including Afrin.
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