Afrin District
Afrin District is a district of Aleppo Governorate in northern Syria. The administrative centre is the city of Afrin. At the 2004 census, the district had a population of 172,095. Syria's Afrin District fell under the control of the People's Protection Units around 2012 and an "Afrin Canton" was declared in 2014, followed by an "Afrin Region" in 2017. During Operation Olive Branch, the entire district was captured by Turkey and its allies.
History
According to René Dussaud, the area of Kurd-Dagh and the plain near Antioch were settled by Kurds since antiquity. Stefan Sperl says that there is reason to believe that Kurdish settlements in the Kurd Mountains go back to the Seleucid Empire, since those regions stood in the path to Antioch; Kurds in the early periods served as mercenaries and mounted archers. In any case, the Kurd Mountains were already Kurdish-inhabited when the Crusades broke out at the end of the 11th century.The area around Afrin developed as the center of a distinctive Sufi "Kurdish Islam". In modern post-independence Syria, the Kurdish society of the district was subject to heavy-handed Arabization policies by the Damascus government.
Syrian civil war
In the course of the Syrian civil war, Damascus government forces pulled back from the district in spring 2012 to give way to the People's Protection Units and autonomous self-governemnt under the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, which was formally declared on 29 January 2014. Until 2018, violence in Afrin was minor, involving artillery shelling by Islamist rebel groups as well as by Islamist-governed Turkey.Afrin was captured by the Turkish Land Forces and Syrian National Army as a result of the 2018 Afrin offensive. Tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees fled from Afrin City before its capture by the SNA in March 2018, and the YPG vowed to retake it. The YPG subsequently announced its intention to start a guerrilla war in Afrin, leading to the SDF insurgency in Northern Aleppo.
Ethnic cleansing
After the Turkish-led forces had captured Afrin in early 2018, they began to implement a resettlement policy by moving their mostly Arab fighters and refugees from southern Syria into the empty homes that belonged to displaced locals. The previous owners, most of them Kurds or Yazidis, were often prevented from returning to Afrin. Though some Kurdish militias of the SNA and the Turkish-backed civilian councils opposed these resettlement policies, most SNA units fully supported them. Refugees from Eastern Ghouta, Damascus, said that they were part of "an organised demographic change" which was said to replace the Kurdish population of Afrin with an Arab majority.Kidnapping of women
Over 150 Yazidi and other Kurdish women and girls have been kidnapped by the SNA since the occupation of Afrin began in early 2018, either for ransom, rape, forced marriage, or because of perceived links to the Democratic Union Party. Many of them were later killed. This activity has been interpreted as part of an Islamist policy of discouraging women from leaving their homes and to remove them from the civic activity they had been encouraged to take part in under the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, as well as part of a broader plan to discourage the return of Yazidi and other Kurdish refugees who fled Afrin in 2018.Demographics
The population of the Afrin District area was overwhelmingly ethnic Kurdish, to the degree that the district had been described as "homogeneously Kurdish". The overall population of Afrin Canton, based on the 2004 Syrian census, was about 200,000.Cities and towns with more than 10.000 inhabitants according to the 2004 Syrian census are Afrin and Jandairis.
Throughout the course of the Syrian Civil War, the Afrin District served as a safe haven for inbound refugees of all ethnicities, fleeing violence and destruction from civil war factions, in particular the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and the diverse more or less Islamist rebel groups of the Syrian opposition. According to a June 2016 estimate from the International Middle East Peace Research Center, about 316,000 displaced Syrians of Kurdish, Yazidi, Arab and Turkmen ethnicity lived in Afrin Canton at the time.
Economy
A diverse agricultural production was at the heart of the Afrin District's economy, traditionally olives in particular, and more recently there was a focus on increasing wheat production. A well-known product from the area is Aleppo soap, a hard soap made from olive oil and lye, distinguished by the inclusion of laurel oil. While the Afrin District has been the source of olive oil for Aleppo soap since antiquity, the destruction caused by the Syrian Civil War to other parts of Aleppo governorate increasingly made the entire production chains locate in Afrin District. At the height of the fighting for Aleppo, up to 50 percent of the city's industrial production was moved to the Afrin District. As of early 2016, two million pairs of jeans were produced per month and exported across Syria. In January 2017, 400 textile industry workshops counted 17,000 employees, supplying the whole of Syria.In 2015 there were 32 tons of Aleppo soap produced and exported to other parts of Syria, but also to international markets.
Tourism
Afrin District also served as a center for domestic tourism due to its beautiful landscapes. The tourism was however somewhat constricted due to the YPG's tight control of the borders, and the war; local tourism mostly collapsed during the Turkish invasion of 2018.Subdistricts
The district of Afrin is divided into seven subdistricts or nawāḥī :| Code | Name | Area | Population | Seat |
| SY020300 | Afrin Subdistrict | km² | Afrin | |
| SY020301 | Bulbul Subdistrict | km² | Bulbul | |
| SY020302 | Jindires Subdistrict | km² | Jindires | |
| SY020303 | Rajo Subdistrict | km² | Rajo | |
| SY020304 | Sharran Subdistrict | km² | Sharran | |
| SY020305 | Shaykh al-Hadid Subdistrict | km² | Shaykh al-Hadid | |
| SY020306 | Maabatli Subdistrict | km² | Maabatli |