Photoblog: Life Slowly Returns to Normal in Ras al-Ayn (Serekaniye)

Piroz Perik

Fighting stopped in Ras al-Ayn (also known in Kurdish as Serekaniye) in the beginning of November after the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), a militia allied with the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), took control of the city and a large number of villages around it. Al-Nusra Front, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and other Islamist groups were forced to retreat.

Most of the residents of Ras al-Ayn had already fled the fighting that resulted in the Free Syrian Army (FSA)’s victory over government forces in November 2012. Many of those who remained evacuated Ras al-Ayn later on several occasions: when Syrian air warplanes bombed the city, when fighting erupted between the FSA and Islamist factions (resulting in an Islamist victory), and, finally, when the Jihadists defended their control of the city against the YPG.

Now, signs of life are slowly returning to this small, beleaguered city of 40,000 near the Turkish border. People have returned to their homes and their agricultural work, the backbone of economic life in the region. Transportation between border towns on the Syrian side has also become safer although it is still relatively unsafe to cross the border to Turkey.

Piroz Perik took these photographs on November 12, 2013.

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