Afrin’s displaced determined to return home, even after death
People displaced from Afrin to Aleppo city’s Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh neighborhoods bury their loved ones in wooden coffins rather than traditional shrouds, hoping to bring them home one day, even after death.
29 July 2024
ALEPPO — Amina Muhammad wanted to go home. When she died displaced from her native Afrin at the start of April, her family did what they could to carry out her final wishes. Laying her body in a wooden coffin, they wrapped it in a layer of plastic before burying her in the Beno village cemetery near Aleppo city’s Kurdish-majority Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood.
“One day, we will take her coffin out of the earth and return her remains to Afrin,” her brother told Syria Direct. “The grief of not returning was in the hearts of all the dead.”
Ahmad Aziz Bakr was buried in the same cemetery, and in the same way, earlier this year. Bakr, 82 years old at the time of his death, had lived in Sheikh Maqsoud—which is controlled by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG)—since 2018, when he was displaced from his hometown of Sheikh al-Hadid (Shih) in the Afrin countryside.
At the start of that year, Turkey and Ankara-backed Syrian operations launched “Operation Olive Branch” against YPG-held Afrin, ultimately taking control of the area in March. More than 300,000 mostly Kurdish civilians fled the offensive after facing abuses and attacks on their property.
Before his death, Bakr entrusted his family with returning his remains to his hometown, so he could be buried alongside the graves of his ancestors, Abu Hozan (a pseudonym), one of his relatives, told Syria Direct.
Burying the dead in wooden coffins is a new custom. Typically, Afrin’s dead were wrapped in simple shrouds and buried in the earth, as is the most common burial practice in Syria. But for the displaced, this method is a way to make it easier to bring their remains home should their surviving relatives return to their land.
Aleppo city’s Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh neighborhoods are predominantly Kurdish. Those living there have roots in Afrin, Kobani (Ain al-Arab) and Syria’s northeastern Jazira region. Despite their long history in Aleppo, these communities did not have their own cemeteries in the city before 2011, as the dead were buried in the graveyards of the villages and towns their families were from—even those born and raised in Aleppo.
Between 2014 and 2016, both neighborhoods were attacked by opposition factions, leading to the displacement of some residents. But after Ankara-backed factions captured Afrin in 2018, Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh received thousands of people displaced from there and other parts of Syria.
Because of the impossibility of transporting bodies back to Afrin for fear of violations at the hands of opposition factions, the displaced began burying their dead in wooden coffins at the Beno village cemetery, which was first established during opposition attacks on Sheikh Maqsoud in 2014.
At the time, it held “seven graves, all of unidentified people in numbered graves, which are still there,” Muhammad Amin, the co-president of the People’s Municipality in Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh, told Syria Direct.
Today, the cemetery contains the bodies of between 3,600 and 4,000 people, most of them displaced from Afrin, Amin said. “Ninety percent of Afrin’s displaced people in Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh put their dead in wooden coffins and close them tightly” before burying them in the graveyard, located in the Haql al-Rami area of Sheikh Maqsoud, he added.
High costs
Displaced people from Afrin to Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh struggle to make a living, like many of the country’s 6.8 million internally displaced people. The cost of burying their loved ones this way is a burden.
Of the 35,000 families in the two neighborhoods, 30,000 are displaced, most of them from Afrin, Amin said. The average salary of those working in sewing and construction in the area is around SYP 500,000 a month ($34 at the current black market exchange rate of SYP 14,700 to the dollar), he estimated.
A wooden coffin costs SYP 700,000 ($47), more than a month’s salary, several sources told Syria Direct. Still, the displaced insist on using them, even if it means going into debt, Abu Hozan said.
Everyone is determined “to return their relatives’ remains when Afrin is liberated, even those who have not been buried in wooden coffins,” Amin said. He attributed this to “the connection Afrin’s displaced have to their cause, land and culture.”
“The bond Afrin’s people have with the land, history and olive trees increased after its occupation, and the accompanying repressive practices against their region,” he added. “They insist on return,” even after death.
While the Beno cemetery now holds thousands of graves, it remains a “temporary” graveyard, its future tied to “the liberation of Afrin, and the exit of the occupation and gunmen,” Amin said. “That day will resemble judgment day,” the dead leaving their graves “to be taken to their villages and reburied alongside their mothers and fathers.”
But in al-Shahbaa, an area of the northern Aleppo countryside that holds the second-largest gathering of people displaced from Afrin, burial practices are different. “The high price of coffins, compared to the deteriorating situation of the displaced, is an obstacle to using wooden coffins,” Muhammad Abdullah, an administrator at the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria’s (AANES) Martyrs’ Families Foundation, said.
When displacement to al-Shahbaa began in 2018, around 25 people were buried in wooden coffins in the cemeteries of the villages and towns they fled to. Then, due to “a lack of capacity to manufacture large numbers of coffins, the displaced started to use bags for burial” instead, Abdullah said. A coffin costs up to SYP 375,000 ($25) in the area, he noted.
Wooden coffins are still used in al-Shahbaa, but “only for the martyrs,” he added, referring to members of the Afrin Liberation Forces, a military group formed in the wake of Operation Olive Branch that periodically conducts operations against opposition factions and Turkish forces in Afrin.
Burial in wooden coffins or traditional shrouds “gives the same result, which is that only the bones are preserved,” a coroner from Afrin, who still lives there, told Syria Direct on condition of anonymity for security reasons. However, coffins are “better in the process of transporting the body.”
“Four months after burial, the body decomposes due to the bacteria and enzymes that are present, which carry out decomposition, leaving only hair and bones,” he added.
In 2019, the AANES established a cemetery for people displaced from Afrin in Tal Qarah, a village in al-Shahbaa. It currently holds around 800 graves, Abdullah said. A separate cemetery in the town of Fafin is dedicated to “the civilian martyrs”—those killed by bombardment or landmines.
Before the cemeteries were established, Afrin’s dead were buried in various villages and towns in al-Shahbaa. Those who fled to the Sherawa subdistrict of Afrin, which is not under Turkish control, bury their dead in its villages’ cemeteries, especially in al-Ziyara and Aqiba, according to Abdullah.
Organizing burial
In the al-Shahbaa displacement camps, AANES communes take care of burial procedures. The Martyrs’ Families Foundation provides a shroud, burial necessities and bags at no cost to the relatives of the deceased. The one exception is “securing a funeral tent, should they wish to erect one, and the cost, if any, of transporting the body to the cemetery,” Afin Alo (a pseudonym), a displaced person from Afrin living in al-Shahbaa, said.
AANES municipalities in the area are responsible for protecting the cemetery, preparing graves and securing supplies such as stone and cement, as well as planting roses and flowers in the graveyard and above the graves, several sources said.
In Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh, the municipality also takes care of burial procedures: digging graves, organizing the cemetery, providing shrouds and writing information about the deceased on headstones—including the name of the village they are originally from. Relatives purchase the coffin.
As it has grown over the past six years, the Beno cemetery has seen no remains transferred to Afrin. The obstacle of “the occupation of Afrin and presence of opposition factions there” remains, Amin of the People’s Municipality said.
Under customary international humanitarian law, parties to a conflict “must endeavor to facilitate the return of the remains of the deceased upon request of the party to which they belong or upon the request of their next of kin.”
A resolution adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 1974 called on parties to armed conflicts, of any nature, to “take such action as may be within their power…to facilitate the disinterment and the return of remains, if requested by their families.”
Hope of return
People displaced from Afrin suffer from a lack of support from international organizations, whether those concerned with human rights or providing UN assistance, Amin said. “The blockade imposed on Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh by Syrian regime authorities prevents organizations from giving them a helping hand as needed, with the exception of the Kurdish Red Crescent,” he added.
AANES-run Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh, as well as the al-Shahbaa region, are encircled by 4th Division of the Syrian army, which periodically blocks the entry of food and fuel in the context of tension and disagreements with the AANES. In January 2023, Amnesty International called on Syrian government forces to “lift a brutal blockade on civilians in predominantly Kurdish areas in the northern Aleppo region.”
With conditions deteriorating, there is no sustainable solution for Afrin’s displaced people but to return home. For that to be possible, “unifying Kurdish efforts and implementing a well-considered action plan to work with all national and international forces, especially countries that are significant in the Syrian crisis” is needed, Qazaqli Muhammad, a Kurdish politician from Afrin who currently lives in Germany, said.
Until the hope of return is realized, parties to the conflict in Syria and relevant international organizations should create a mechanism to allow Afrin’s displaced to bury their dead in their home villages and towns “in adherence to their last will” as part of “their human right to a dignified death,” he said.
Muhammad called on the United States, Russia and Iran to “pressure Turkey, and discuss with it to create a safe and dignified mechanism for Afrin’s displaced to return, and for the burial of the bodies of their dead in their villages, under the auspices of international human organizations.” He also called on these countries to work for “the withdrawal of [Turkish] forces from occupied Syrian territories to its international borders, and urgently find a political solution to the intractable crisis.”
Meanwhile, the AANES and Kurdish movement in general should “review themselves, set aside their differences and fulfill their responsibilities and duties towards the occupied areas, especially Afrin, to the fullest, for the return of their people,” he concluded.
Returning the remains of Afrin’s dead has become a preoccupation among its people to the point that “there have been deaths among those displaced from Afrin who were in Damascus, and their bodies were brought for burial in the Beno cemetery out of their relatives’ desire for their graves to be close to Afrin,” which lies around 60 kilometers away, Amin said.
After more than six years, burial in wooden coffins has become “an Afrin culture, tied to the determination to return to their land and be buried there,” he added. “It is a situation that has not happened anywhere on Syrian soil before.”
In Sheikh Maqsoud, Farhad Sido, a 42-year-old man displaced from Afrin, pointed his hand out toward the steadily expanding Beno cemetery, where a number of his own relatives lie buried.
“This graveyard has grown large,” he said. “Before dying, the elders entrust us with returning them to Afrin. They insist on it.”
This report was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson.