‘We feel the loss’: Afrin Kurds mourn Maydanki’s forest

AFRIN — Rankin Muhammad (a pseudonym) remembers Afrin’s Maydanki Lake as it once was. In her youth, she spent weekends with friends in its forest, waters and small island.

“It was an outlet for us since we were children—swimming and fishing in the lake, preparing traditional Kurdish food on the bank,” the 47-year-old told Syria Direct. Days “flew by in a bustle of boisterous joy, singing and dancing to the tunes of the buzuq,” a type of long-necked lute, she recalled.

Like many young people in Afrin, a Kurdish-majority area in the northern Aleppo countryside, Muhammad and her friends etched their initials into the bark of trees in the Maydanki forest. They wrote in Kurdish, which was “banned from official use,” she said. “We felt the beauty of the letters then, which for us represent love, a challenge to injustice and tyranny.”

Today, she stands on the edge of what remains of the Maydanki forest. It looks nothing like her memories: “Felled trees, land that in less than six years turned into something more like a desert.”

“Everything in the forest has fallen silent. There is no rustling of trees. The birds have gone. It is as though they uprooted our hearts by cutting down the trees,” Muhammad said sadly. 

The Maydanki area is famed for the beauty of its lake, formerly surrounded by a dense evergreen forest on several sides. It was once a destination for tourists from around Syria and beyond, as well as a natural escape for locals. 

Maydanki Lake was created in the early 2000s to store water and generate electricity through the hydroelectric Afrin Dam. In 2004, the artificial lake and its surroundings were declared a nature preserve and quickly became a popular recreation spot. 

Throughout much of the war in Syria, the lake and dam were controlled by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). Then, in 2018, Ankara and Turkish-backed opposition Syrian National Army (SNA) factions launched Operation Olive Branch, a cross-border military operation against the YPG, and took control of Afrin. 

More than 300,000 mostly Kurdish civilians fled the 2018 offensive after facing abuses and attacks on their property. Over the following years, violations continued, including the cutting of olive trees on private farmland and the logging of the forest around Maydanki Lake. 

“Just after the military operation, logging was limited. It quickly worsened with the arrival of people displaced from the Homs countryside and Ghouta that year,” Muhammad said. The new arrivals pitched tents in the forest, and when winter came “cut down the trees to use the wood for heating and cooking.” 

From cutting trees for survival, logging soon became a “profitable business” for local military factions, which “destroyed vast areas of the forests to sell the wood and distribute a portion of it among their members,” she added. “Not even the olive and pomegranate trees escaped this destruction,” done “in the name of the displaced, who were used as human cover for their actions.” 

In 2022, the SNA’s Sultan Murad Division was accused of involvement in cutting down trees around Maydanki Lake. One member Syria Direct spoke to at the time denied his faction was responsible but did not deny that local military factions were involved. 

“It is no longer a secret to anyone that [the factions] are directly responsible for the logging,” Muhammad said. Unlike past years, “their forces have started to talk about it among us. We happen across them in the streets and markets, and hear about it from them.” 

Read more: ‘Crimes against nature’: Forest clearing around Afrin’s Maydanki Lake sparks anger and shock

The fate of the Maydanki forest is a small part of ongoing illegal logging operations in Afrin as a whole. In 2023, an investigation and satellite imagery analysis by Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ) found that at least 114 forest sites in Afrin were logged since 2018. Of them, 57 locations were severely damaged and 42 moderately damaged. 

Environmental and economic damages

Deforestation and illegal tree cutting endangers the ecological balance and raises emissions. A reduction in oxygen-producing green spaces leads to a higher percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which in turn drives up temperatures, Haifa Ayyoubi, an environmental expert working with civil society organizations in Afrin, told Syria Direct. 

Other risks include “soil pollution, disruption of the water cycle, reduced rainfall, reduced biodiversity and the extinction of some animal and plant species,” Ayyoubi added. “Birds and animals leave after losing shelter, shade and food,” while “the soil loses many necessary nutrients, negatively impacting the lives of some plants.” 

The shoreline and hills overlooking Maydanki Lake have been stripped of most trees, 30/6/2024 (Tamara Musa/Syria Direct)

“The wild boar, once widespread in the Maydanki forest, has disappeared,” Revan Ibrahim, a Kurdish activist from Afrin, said. “There are no more oaks.” The forest’s transformation from dense greenery to dry land has also cost many families their livelihoods, as cafeterias, restaurants and shops catering to tourists are widespread in the area. 

“This crime casts a shadow on the mental and social health of the area’s people, who mourn their natural heritage and source of income,” Muhammad added. “We feel the loss, after the destruction of the Maydanki forest. Many women feel that.” 

The green oasis of the forest “was, to me, an earthly paradise,” interwoven with “memories of childhood and youth,” she said. Today, it is a source of “heartbreak, given what has become of it.” 

Muhammad’s attachment to her memories of the forest once prompted her to search for a tree where she once wrote her and her husband’s name. “I didn’t find it,” she said. “It has become a strange place.” 

No accountability

STJ, in its 2023 report, estimated the number of trees felled in Afrin at the tens of thousands. There are no official figures assessing the damage, however. 

“Large areas have been damaged, it is a general problem,” Rinas Abdulrahman, head of the local council in Sheran (Shera) subdistrict that includes Maydanki, told Syria Direct. “If we reduce it to Maydanki, we underestimate the scale of the issue.”

The Afrin Chamber of Agriculture and Agricultural Offices has issued circulars “prohibiting the cutting of forest trees in all of Afrin, not only in Shera,” Abdulrahman said. These directives have had no results, at a time when “military factions impose their might on the judiciary and largely control it when the matter is related to one of their forces,” he added. 

“We need a lot of time to build a civil society and real institutions, to end the state of chaos the Syrian people have tasted the bitterness of,” Abdulrahman said. He lamented a lack of independent unions and associations, especially after a recent decision by the opposition Syrian Interim Government—which administers the area—to shut down a number of branches of the Free Bar Association, in what he viewed as an effort to put pressure on the body and remove its ability to “monitor the dysfunction of the judiciary.” 

Muhammad does not place stock in official institutions or “paper decisions that have not stemmed the bleeding.” She called decisions to prohibit illegal logging “a formality,” as they were only issued after the crisis circulated in the media. “They have not bound the armed factions, but rather were used by them to stop displaced people from cutting trees and systematically monopolize them for themselves,” she said. 

In SNA-controlled parts of northwestern Syria, the military police are supposed to play a key role in preventing violations by armed factions, while the civilian police prevent civilian crimes. Both parties “turn a blind eye to the issue, in exchange for bribes,” she contended. 

“Forests have been intentionally burned to turn them into sites for the establishment of camps. The military factions have also leased lands” they do not own, a violation Turkey bears ultimate responsibility for because the area is under the influence of Ankara and the factions it backs, she added. 

Turkey has been accused of allowing, directly or indirectly, the large-scale removal of trees from areas of its influence in Kurdish areas of Iraq and Syria. 

Afforestation initiatives

The Sheran Local Council is currently working to reforest logged areas of Maydanki, where 4,000 trees have been planted so far. The council hopes to restore the beauty of Maydanki Lake, which is “not some far-fetched dream,” Abdulrahman said. 

“The responsibility lies with everyone, including members of the community, because no party can confront this crisis alone,” he added. “The need requires everyone’s participation, from families to officials and local international organizations.” 

While work to reforest stripped areas is important, Muhammad stressed the need for “all those interested in Syria’s future to intervene and stop the environmental, humanitarian and moral crimes, to protect what remains of Afrin’s forest and preserve its people’s memory.”

This report was produced as part of Syria Direct’s Sawtna Training Program for women journalists across areas of control in Syria. It was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson.