Civilians cautiously return to Aleppo neighborhoods after the Syrian army secures areas hit by the conflict with SDF.
Aleppo, Syria – Spent bullet shell casings litter the classrooms and corridors of Qassem Amin school in Aleppo’s Ashrafieh neighbourhood. Desks barricade the stairwells; glass from shattered windows crunches underfoot.
The school’s playground turned into a battleground last week, as it sat on the front line of fierce fighting between fighters from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Syrian government forces.
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SDF snipers had commandeered the top floor of the school five months earlier, while classes continued below, school staff explained.
“It was very wrong,” said the school’s head teacher, Ouafa Zein al-Dein, “especially for the children”.
“We never interacted with them, never even spoke to them,” Zein al-Dein said of the SDF fighters. “I never let anyone near them.”
On January 6, the day fighting started, the school’s pupils had just sat down for exams. They never finished them. When Zein al-Dein heard the first explosions, she quickly sent the children home.
SDF strongholds
At least 155,000 people fled Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maqsoud, the predominantly Kurdish Aleppo neighbourhoods where the fighting took place.
The areas had been controlled by the SDF for 10 years.
Last March, the SDF agreed to merge with the Syrian army after a meeting between the group’s leader, Mazloum Abdi (also known as Mazloum Kobani), and Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa. It was part of a broader deal to bring all SDF-controlled areas of Syria under the control of the new government, which took power after the fall of the regime of former President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.
But the integration of the SDF into the state never happened.
The five days of intense fighting that broke out last week only ended when SDF forces agreed to withdraw. They only did so, they said, to stop the Syrian army targeting civilian buildings, accusations the Syrian army denies. The SDF itself is accused of hitting civilian targets, an accusation it also denies.
Civilians return
The Syrian government is now allowing residents to return to most of the areas hit by last week’s fighting.
In the freezing rain on Monday, families were finally allowed back into Sheikh Maqsoud’s warren of tightly packed streets. A spider’s web of electricity cables hung across the tops of the three- and four-floor concrete and breeze-block homes that make up this neighbourhood.
“Someone from the SDF wanted to use my house to fire from,” said one man, Abu Walid, as he reopened his supermarket on the main road running through Sheikh Maqsoud.
“I stopped them by saying the house had been affected by the [2023] earthquake. I asked him, ‘What about the lives of civilians?’ He told me it didn’t matter; what mattered is that we remain here as the ones in control.”
After the SDF withdrew at the end of last week, Syrian army security forces searched the neighbourhood for booby traps and weapons.
They were also looking for prisoners taken during the fall of the al-Assad regime. At the time, the SDF was allied with the regime, and civil activists and opposition fighters had been arrested if they were stopped at SDF checkpoints.
The Syrian army is now fully in control of these two neighbourhoods.
But the SDF has not disappeared. It is still in control of Syria’s northeast and reportedly regrouping some units in the countryside, just 50km (31 miles) east of Aleppo.
