Afrîn

Afrîn's roots reach into the second millennium BC under the Hurrians and Mitanni. It was part of the ancient Kurdish kingdom of Commagene in the first century BC. Its name comes from the river Afrin that runs through the region and joins the Euphrates. Romans, Byzantines and Muslims followed. Under Islam Afrîn became part of the Ayyubid emirate of Aleppo, then of the Mamluks and the Ottomans. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was a semi-autonomous province ruled by large Kurdish tribes, chief among them the Shikoyi and the Jume. It was known for its Sufi life and as an important centre of the Naqshbandiyya in Syria. With Kurdistan cut apart by new states in the early twentieth century, Afrîn became part of French Syria and then of independent Syria. Under the elder Assad it knew bitter marginalisation: a 1962 census stripped many inhabitants of their citizenship for decades, Kurdish education was banned, and farmers were barred from owning the olive lands their grandfathers had left them. With the Syrian revolution of 2011, Afrîn became one of the cantons of Kurdish self-administration under the PYD, alongside Cizîrê and Kobanê. Six years of relative peace followed; Kurdish education was restored and women took leading positions for the first time. The Turkish concern was that Afrîn borders Turkey directly across Mount Kurdagh. On 20 January 2018, Turkey launched Operation Olive Branch with allied Syrian militias and, after two months of fighting, occupied Afrîn. More than 300,000 Kurdish civilians fled to the Shahba and Aleppo areas; some of their villages were repopulated by Arabs and Turkmens from Idlib. Tens of thousands of olive trees were cut or stolen, Kurdish homes confiscated. Thousands of Kurds have filed complaints with the United Nations, and Afrîn still waits for a liberation that has not come. But Afrîn's olive oil, exported to Europe with its unique fragrance, carries in every drop the memory of the mountain.