AL-QAMISHLI, Syria — In a pitch-black room on the third floor of an unfinished apartment building, two men sit cross-legged on a mattress. It’s bitterly cold. The men are hungry, penniless and filled with fear. They are among large numbers of Alawites who have sought sanctuary in this town on Syria’s border with Turkey and elsewhere in Kurdish northeast Syria. One clutches his head in despair, another sucks on a cigarette as he stares dazedly at a reporter. Both have just come from Sheikh Maqsud, the Kurdish-majority neighborhood in Aleppo that was wrested by government forces last month. “What are we going to do, where are we going to go, who is going to protect us?” one of the men who identified himself as Soman Soltani asked.

Fierce fighting erupted in early January between Syrian government forces and fighters linked to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. The clashes raged on for three days and resulted in the deaths of dozens of combatants from both sides. At least 23 civilians died and over 100 were wounded, rights groups say. 

Soltani was on an errand when the shooting started and was unable to return to his wife and four children. “There was a tank parked outside our building’s door,” he said. He took shelter at Sheikh Maqsud’s only functioning hospital, the Martyr Khaled Fajr Hospital. Security proved fleeting. The hospital became the target of the Syrian army on the grounds that Kurdish militants were using it as a base. “They were striking the hospital with drones, and continued even after a humanitarian corridor for our evacuation [to Qamishli] was declared. The hospital was overflowing with corpses,” Soltani recalled.

Fearful and friendless