Afrin District
Throughout the course of the Syrian Civil War, the Afrin District served as a safe haven for inbound refugees of all ethnicities. According to a June 2016 estimate from the International Middle East Peace Research Center, about 316,000 displaced Syrians of Kurdish, Yazidi, Arab and Turkmen ethnicity lived in Afrin Canton at the time. After the Turkish-led forces had captured Afrin in early 2018, they began to implement a resettlement policy by moving their mostly Arab fighters and refugees from southern Syria into the empty homes that belonged to displaced locals. The previous owners, most of them Kurds or Yazidis, were often prevented from returning to Afrin. Refugees from Eastern Ghouta, Damascus, told Patrick Cockburn of "The Independent" that they were part of "an organised demographic change" which was said to replace the Kurdish population of Afrin with an Arab majority.