Afrin District
In the 1930s, Kurdish Alevis who fled the persecution of the Turkish Army during the Dersim Massacre, settled in Maabatli in the Afrin District. Prior to the Syrian Civil War, the population of the Afrin District area was overwhelmingly ethnic Kurdish, to the degree that the district had been described as "homogeneously Kurdish". The overall population of Afrin Canton, based on the 2004 Syrian census, was about 200,000.