The living and the dead are coming home to Afrin as displaced families return with the remains of their loved ones, fulfilling a long-held wish to lay them to rest in their native soil. The post The living and the dead return home to Afrin appeared first on Syria Direct.
The living and the dead are coming home to Afrin as displaced families return with the remains of their loved ones, fulfilling a long-held wish to lay them to rest in their native soil.
24 June 2026
QAMISHLI — A year and a half after burying her three-year-old son in a cemetery in Hasakah city, Haifa Naasan, 24, brought his body home with her to Afrin.
Naasan journeyed back to her birthplace, the Maabatli district of the Afrin countryside, as part of the latest in a series of convoys organized for displaced people returning to the Kurdish-majority region of northwestern Aleppo. The June 10 convoy included 1,700 families displaced from Afrin to Derik (al-Malikiya) and Qamishli in northeastern Syria.
“It was painful to bring his body out of the grave, but we were determined from the start to bring him with us to our village and bury him there, so we could always visit his grave,” Naasan told Syria Direct while on the road. “Afrin is our land. We live there, and we bury our loved ones in its soil.”
Naasan’s son, Armanj Farhad Imo, died in December 2024, 20 days after his family fled the al-Shahbaa of northern Aleppo for Hasakah city during “Operation Dawn of Freedom”: a Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) offensive against Kurdish forces launched during the opposition campaign that ultimately toppled the Assad regime. Naasan, like thousands of others in al-Shahbaa, was previously displaced from Afrin by the SNA’s 2018 Operation Olive Branch.
With a previous convoy of 1,200 families on May 10, Slava Muhammad Ali, 27, returned to her hometown in Afrin’s Rajo district with her sister and brother-in-law—alongside the bodies of her father, mother and brother, who were buried in Qamishli seven years earlier.
For Ali’s family, this meant “the restoration of a moral and human right for our loved ones to rest in the soil they lived for and longed for until their final moments,” she told Syria Direct. It felt like “a soul returning to its homeland.”
“We felt as though a long-awaited reunion had finally taken place between our loved ones and the soil of Afrin, between memory, place and the longing that lived with us for so many years,” Ali said.
As part of the same convoy, Muhammad Nour Hanan, 20, and his family, transported the body of his grandmother, Falak Bakr Bakir, who died six months earlier at the age of 72 and had been buried in a cemetery in Qamishli’s al-Hilaliya neighborhood.
Speaking to Syria Direct via WhatsApp, Hanan remembered his grandmother’s grief and longing to see Afrin again before her death. Bakir would always tell her family, “If I die here and have not seen Afrin, you must take my body to Afrin, even if it takes 100 years,” he recalled.
When organized return trips began this spring, Hanan’s grandfather would “cry, saying, ‘how will I return to Afrin, and Falak is here,’” he added. “So we were determined to bring her body with us” when returning to their native Maabatli. If not, it would be difficult for the family to make the journey of seven or eight hours to visit her grave in Qamishli.
Alongside the remains of Ali and Hanan’s family members, six additional bodies were transported to various Afrin villages for burial as part of the same May 10 convoy, Syria Direct observed.
Displaced people from Afrin gather at a square in Derik (al-Malikiya), northeastern Syria, waiting for buses to transport them home as part of an organized return convoy, 9/6/2026 (Salam Ali/Syria Direct)
In the years after Afrin’s people were displaced by Operation Olive Branch in 2018, many families adopted new temporary burial practices, interring the dead in costly wooden coffins or plastic bags in the hopes of returning their remains to Afrin for reburial at the first opportunity.
Everywhere they were displaced—from Qamishli, Hasakah and al-Shahbaa to the Aleppo city neighborhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh—the living and the dead waited for return.
Read more: Afrin’s displaced determined to return home, even after death
At the time, transporting bodies back to Afrin was impossible for many families, due to security concerns and fears of harassment or abuse along the way in light of documented violations committed by armed opposition factions against civilians, especially Kurds, in the area.
But with the military changes that swept the region with the fall of the Assad regime on December 8, 2024, and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) losing control of the al-Shahbaa area of northern Aleppo, roads between Aleppo and Afrin reopened.
Thousands of families returned and began to transfer the remains of their loved ones to Afrin, particularly following demands for al-Shahbaa cemeteries holding the remains of displaced people to be cleared and converted into agricultural land.
Organized return convoys from northeastern Syria to Afrin began in March 2026, and are tied to the January integration agreement between Damascus and the SDF, which included guaranteeing the return of displaced people.
As they returned, families traveling from Kobani (Ain al-Arab), Qamishli and Hasakah began moving the remains of their dead and reburying them in Afrin, fulfilling promises and hopes long deferred by years of displacement and restricted access.
“Any family with a deceased relative outside Afrin has the right to transport the body and bury it here,” said Zana Khalil, a spokesperson for the area’s administration. Coordination with local authorities is not required, she added, as it is “a primarily humanitarian issue.”
So far, eight convoys have been organized, bringing an estimated 15,000 people—3,000 or 4,000 families—back to Afrin, Khalil said. Other displaced people have returned individually, without joining formal convoys, bringing the total number of returnees to around 8,000 families, she added.
“There are only 1,000 or 2,000 families who have not been able to return yet, while 90-95 percent of Afrin’s people have returned to their areas,” according to Khalil.
For many families, the process of returning and laying loved ones to rest in Afrin is deeply emotional. “The pain is great, indescribable, but I felt an inner peace for the first time,” Ali said, “as though they were finally at rest, returned to the home their hearts never left, that they never left in their being.”
Vehicles loaded with the belongings of displaced families sit parked just before a return convoy embarks from Qamishli to Afrin, 10/6/2026 (Salam Ali/Syria Direct)
Transferring remains to Afrin requires families to complete a number of procedures, Ibrahim Haftaro, a general council member of the Afrin Social Association in Qamishli, said. For the recently deceased, a coroner’s report must be presented, alongside a document issued by the Afrin Social Association, “to facilitate the transport process and avoid any issues they could face along the way,” he explained.
In cases of deaths that took place years ago, each family submits a request to the association for a document verifying the identity of the deceased, their relation and the family’s desire to transfer the remains to Afrin, Haftaro said. This document is particularly important in cases where only bones remain, as it helps prove the identity of the deceased and avoid any problems during transport.
A few days before moving Armanj’s body to Afrin on June 10, Naasan obtained a death certificate, as well as a paper from her neighborhood commune proving parentage, with information stamped by the Internal Security Forces (Asayish) in Hasakah, she told Syria Direct. Her son’s body was exhumed the day before the journey to Afrin and placed in a new coffin.
Two days before Hanan left Hasakah, he went to the Afrin Association to obtain a document confirming his grandmother’s death and providing consent for the removal of her body to Afrin. On the day of the convoy, Hanan, his brother, grandfather and three workers exhumed Falak’s body.
“During the process, my grandfather sat and watched what was happening. He couldn’t hold back his tears as he watched his wife’s remains be exhumed,” Hanan said. His grandmother’s body was transported with those of five others. When they reached Afrin, where Hanan’s aunts and other relatives were waiting, she was reburied at the Hanan Shrine.
“That day, my grandmother was at rest,” Hanan said. “She slept in Afrin, becoming part of its soil.”
This report was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson.
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