KHABUR VALLEY, Northeast Syria — A concrete shack pockmarked with bullet holes and with no running water, electricity, windows or doors is what Faslah Hussein Osman, her husband and five children call home.  

It faces the carcass of Saint Mary’s church in Tel Nasr, a village that was mainly inhabited by Syrian Orthodox Christians who fled en masse shortly before the Islamic State struck in February 2015.

The Osmans are among an estimated 350 Kurdish and Arab Muslim families struggling to survive in the ruins of Tel Nasr, one of 36 Syriac villages that lie abandoned in the once bucolic Khabur Valley. They fled their homes when the Turkish military and its Sunni opposition allies in the Syrian National Army invaded a broad swath of Kurdish-controlled territory in northeast Syria in October 2019. The operation called “Peace Spring” that was greenlit by former US President Donald Trump provoked an international outcry, forcing Trump to reverse his decision to withdraw some 900 US special operations forces defending the area.

Two years on, displaced families here are gripped with fear as Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, threatens to mount yet another offensive against the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led group that crushed IS in Syria.