Syrian authorities this week reopened a main road linking the country's business and industrial capital of Aleppo with eastern areas under the control of a mostly Kurdish armed group, sources said.
The move is aimed at improving stability after a US-brokered deal halted fighting in eastern Syria between government troops and Kurdish forces last month. Ties between Damascus and minority groups in Syria, mainly Alawites and Druze, have been marred by violence, 14 months after the downfall of former president Bashar Al Assad.
The deal obliges the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to join the post-Assad state. It stipulates that displaced people can return to their homes and addresses aspects of the long-standing Kurdish question.
"Opening the highway signals lessened tension and makes the return of the displaced easier,” a European humanitarian official involved in talks between the two sides told The National.
About four million people remain displaced within Syria, compared with seven million just before the Assad regime fell in December 2024, the UN has said.
On Wednesday, roadblocks were set up between the government and the SDF along parts of the motorway, called the M4, the official said. On March 2, state media reported that an envoy of Syrian President Ahmad Al Shara met SDF leader Mazloum Abdi and discussed "security measures" on the route.
Sections of the motorway have been closed since Turkey overran parts of northern Syria from 2018 to 2019 to curb SDF territorial expansion. Ankara regards the group as part of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which it has designated as a terrorist organisation.
Other sections of the M4 have been closed since January, when government forces and armed tribesmen reclaimed areas held by the SDF. That operation began with a large Kurdish district in Aleppo, with forces moving east along the Euphrates River Valley. The push was halted at population centres that are home to large concentrations of Kurds in the north-east. Kurds constituted 10 per cent of Syria’s 20 million population in 2022, the last year before the civil war.
The official said several Kurdish families have started returning to Ras Al Ayn, a mixed Arab and Kurdish city that was part of Turkey’s zone of control during the civil war. Arabs who fled SDF rule in the past decade have also begun to return to the north-eastern province of Hasakah.
In the last decade before Mr Al Assad was toppled, thousands of Arab and Kurdish families fled their homes in the north and east of Syria, as the SDF expanded its control.
The government in February appointed Khairo Al Daoud, a Kurd, as an official in charge of returning people to Afrin. On Monday, it announced that 400 Kurdish families in Hasakah had travelled by bus back to their homes in the farming area of Afrin, north of the city of Aleppo. They had fled the capture of Afrin by Turkey and allied groups in 2018 and travelled to SDF-ruled areas in Hasakah.
A resident of Afrin said by phone that some Arab families had, since the downfall of the Assad regime, left Afrin to go back to their homes near Damascus and in Hama province. They fled those areas during the 2011 uprising against Assad family rule and the ensuing civil war.
