TABQA, Syria — On a recent afternoon in late November, at a sprawling displacement facility erected on the pitch of a soccer stadium, Imad Mohammed Katranu was using planks from wooden crates to build a structure for his beloved pigeons. “I can’t live without animals. They help me get through the day,” Katranu told Al-Monitor as he paused for a cigarette. “He lost his eye in a Turkish drone strike in 2016. There is still shrapnel in his body. Life was very hard for us as a family. It is even harder here,” his wife, Roshin, explained.

Like the majority of residents at the makeshift Azadi, or "Freedom," camp, the Katranu family arrived here in December 2024. They are among tens of thousands of ethnic Kurds who fled the Shehba area in northwest Syria as Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, and forces from his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militia were marching onto neighboring Aleppo from Idlib in their Dawn of Freedom offensive, which toppled the country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, on Dec. 10.

“It was one week before Assad’s fall. They were jihadis. We did not know if they would target us as well. We saw dead bodies along the way. It was terrifying,” Mustafa Saied, a 62-year-old farmer who lives here with his wife and nine children, recalled of the journey. 

Iranian and Russian forces stationed in the area withdrew as Sharaa’s men advanced, “leaving us completely at Turkey and the jihadis’ mercy,” said Ibrahim Haftaro, who heads a civic organization in Qamishli that provides support for the displaced from Afrin.