Once again, the relentless sound of gunfire echoed across Syria's Aleppo. But unlike the past few days, when parts of the city had turned into urban warfare between the Syrian army and Kurdish fighters, the shots did not come from ground clashes.
The sound came from Syrian soldiers repeatedly firing at drones overhead, attempting to bring the devices down.
As the Syrian army announced it had taken control of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh, two Kurdish-majority districts of Aleppo previously held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the city was hit by a series of drone attacks, which Damascus blamed on the SDF.
On Sunday morning, SDF chief Mazloum Abdi said that an “understanding that leads to a ceasefire” had been reached with the Syrian forces. Syria's national news agency, Sana, reported that the Kurdish forces had evacuated the area.
Mr Abdi said the agreement had been reached with international mediation and called on the mediators to ensure the “safe return” of the displaced.
While the battle on the ground was nearing its end, another one began in the skies, stoking fears among civilians, desperate to for the violence to finally end, in a country ravaged by years of civil war.
Sana reported that four civilians were injured in drone attacks on Saturday. One drone struck the Aleppo governorate building, where the governor, Azzam al Gharib, and Syria’s Minister of Social Affairs, Hind Kabawat, were holding a press conference.
Mohamed, 48, who spoke under a pseudonym, said he was near one of the drone attacks. “Of course I’m afraid. Anyone would be. You can’t ignore it when drones are hovering in the sky,” he said. “The drone is vicious. It can strike anywhere it wants.”
He said he did not expect the clashes to spread beyond the front lines. His four children were already in shock after days of hearing explosions and gunfire.
“We’re tired of the war. The economy is shattered. We’ve had enough. This was supposed to be a new Syria,” he said, referring to the fall of the regime of former president Bashar Al Assad in December 2024. “But it felt like we were coming back to the war days.”
The army’s announcement that it had completed its military operations in the Kurdish-majority neighbourhood of Sheikh Maqsoud in Aleppo, ending the clashes on the ground, has given him hope that the situation will soon stabilise and that the violence will completely stop.
Mohamed Tendis owns a foul stand, a popular fava bean dish, at Saadallah Al Jabri Square in the heart of Aleppo, just a few metres from the governorate building that was attacked. He recounted a moment of panic when the blast hit.
“But people are already coming back in the square,” he said. “They won't stop living”.
But the future remains uncertain. While most Kurdish fighters have been expelled from Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maqsoud, two areas isolated from other Kurdish regions in Syria, the SDF still controls a much wider territory in the north-east. And the violence has complicated the already stalled integration of the semi-autonomous bloc into the central government.
Both sides have accused each other of breaches. Damascus accused the SDF of using civilians as shields and embedding its forces in civilian infrastructure. The SDF, in turn, accused Syrian forces of attacking civilian infrastructure during the clashes, including the Khaled Fajer Hospital in Sheikh Maqsoud, in breach of international humanitarian law.
The path to reconciliation still appears distant. Violence in other hotspots, where tension between Damascus and the SDF continue to simmer in places such as Deir Hafer, the Tishreen Dam and Deir ez-Zor, could also erupt at any moment.
Mahmood Tet, 40, who was displaced from his home in Sheikh Maqsoud for several days by the violence, said his only wish is to finally return.
“We don’t have any issues with the Kurds. All my neighbours are Kurds. We coexisted without problems. We just want to come back home now,” he said, as he waited near the neighbourhood, whose entrance, still barred by the army on Saturday for security reasons, is lined with bullet-riddled buildings.
