Explained: Historical Background of Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maqsoud

Earlier this month, violence escalated in the Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh neighbourhoods of Aleppo, amid clashes between the forces of the Syrian transitional government and the Asayish security forces affiliated with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Days of shelling and fighting inside densely populated neighbourhoods caused extensive damage to public and private property, with some medical facilities forced to halt operations.

This escalation coincided with mass displacement and a heavy security presence. The UN documented tens of thousands of families displaced from Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh to other areas, including the Afrin region and collective shelters inside the city of Aleppo. The authorities also issued evacuation warnings for some neighbourhoods, imposed curfews, and forced residents to move away from front lines, while movement into and out of Aleppo remained severely restricted for extended periods.

The crisis analysis organisation ACAPS reported by January 15 that the clashes killed at least 23 people and displaced around 148,000 from Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh, marking one of the largest displacement waves in years of conflict. This continued until a partial ceasefire was reached, allowing for the evacuation of civilians and the wounded, and the withdrawal of Asayish fighters from the area towards northeastern Syria.

The informal settlements of Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maqsoud

The Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maqsoud neighbourhoods are located on hills in northern Aleppo city and have historically developed as urban extensions shaped by successive waves of migration. In the aftermath of the 1915 Armenian genocide, a number of Armenians and Assyrians settled on these northern hills, which were then known by different names: Al-Daoudiya and Jabal Al-Sayyida. This early Christian presence left its initial imprint on the area’s urban and social fabric before its character later changed profoundly.

From the early 1970s onwards, the two neighbourhoods underwent significant demographic transformations as a result of large-scale migration from the Kurdish countryside of Aleppo and northern Syria, particularly from Afrin and Kobani. These movements were driven by employment opportunities in nearby industrial zones such as Al-Layramoun and Bani Zaid, as well as access to education at the University of Aleppo. Newcomers settled in Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maqsoud because of their proximity to workplaces and the relatively low cost of housing. Over time, the neighbourhoods acquired a predominantly working-class and Kurdish character, while still retaining Christian families and others from Turkmen, Arab, and Alawite communities, most of whom belonged to low-income groups and the city’s middle-class public employees.

This transformation unfolded alongside a long process of marginalisation and repression by Baath Party authorities against the Kurdish residents of the two neighbourhoods. Their political and social events were repeatedly met with arrest campaigns, humiliation, and killings, while tensions between local communities were deliberately instrumentalised. This deepened social fractures and entrenched Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maqsoud in Kurdish collective memory as spaces of both oppression and resilience.

In urban planning terms, the neighbourhoods are dominated by a pattern of contiguous, low-income housing, with closely packed multi-storey buildings, some rising to six or seven floors. Apartments are typically small, poorly ventilated, and poorly lit, and the narrow streets suffer from chronic neglect of municipal services. This pattern was not the result of formal planning so much as a grassroots response to an acute housing need, as residents began building their homes themselves from the 1970s onwards. The rate of informal construction in Sheikh Maqsoud is high, with licensed and unlicensed buildings intermingling in the western part of the neighbourhood across an area of around 180 hectares. In Ashrafieh, by contrast, most residential buildings are formally registered and hold official title deeds. Nevertheless, unlicensed construction is widespread, particularly encroachments on shared spaces through the addition of extra floors or construction on jointly owned land without formal subdivision.

Lack of urban planning

At the planning level, the Gutton Master Plan, adopted in Aleppo in 1954, shows partial zoning features for sections of Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maqsoud, including the street network and the distribution of some residential blocks. Cadastral maps prepared in the early 1930s also reveal that parts of Ashrafieh predate that period indicating that some buildings existed prior to the French Mandate. These were later subject to cadastral surveying, with their descriptions and coordinates fixed and registered in the names of their occupants.

Although Ashrafieh was planned during the same period as the Muhafaza (“Governorate”) neighbourhood to its south, the planning approach differed radically. The Muhafaza area was selected to serve as an aristocratic urban frontage, benefiting from state care and beautification, while Ashrafieh was largely left to the individual efforts of its residents, reflecting the state’s inability to absorb the scale of housing demand. This reality pushed residents towards semi-legal solutions, most notably the subdivision of properties through court rulings known as “judicial subdivisions,” arising from lawsuits to confirm the sale of shares, which later resulted in the physical division of properties. Most of these judicial subdivisions were recorded in the land registry, as construction largely followed the outlines of the Gutton Plan. Structures that did not conform to the plan, however, remained unregistered and unsubdivided.

In Sheikh Maqsoud, the Gutton Plan shows limited regulation in the area locally known as eastern Sheikh Maqsoud, overlooking the Christian cemeteries, where the street network and block layout largely correspond to present-day reality. By contrast, western Sheikh Maqsoud, along with the expansion areas of Ashrafieh, consists mostly of informal construction zones, together covering an area of approximately 250 hectares. Large portions of these areas lack judicial subdivisions altogether, leaving residents permanently vulnerable to the risks of eviction and displacement under planning pretexts.

These risks became particularly evident during the preparation of urban planning studies for informal areas in Aleppo between 2005 and 2006. While plans were adopted that largely reflected the existing urban fabric in neighbourhoods such as Al-Haydariyya, Tal Al-Zarazir, and Jabal Badro – despite most of them being built on state-owned land – Sheikh Maqsoud and the expanded areas of Ashrafieh were excluded from this approach. Planning studies were drawn up for these areas that disregarded the existing urban fabric, cutting through entire residential neighbourhoods with new roads and imposing block layouts disconnected from reality. Given the fragile legal status of residents’ rights, any implementation of these plans would have meant removing residents from their homes without compensation. As a result, these projects were repeatedly postponed for political reasons, reflecting the extent of official indifference to the suffering of residents in these neighbourhoods.

From urban marginalisation to local self-organisation

With the outbreak of the war in Aleppo in 2012, the area came under the control of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), becoming an enclave outside the authority of both the Assad regime and the opposition. The neighbourhood turned into an active front line, subjected to struggles over influence, suffocating sieges, and intense shelling – particularly between 2015 and 2016, by Jabhat Al-Nusra, which attempted to penetrate the area, especially from the Youth Housing and Al-Maghassel areas. These attempts failed due to the neighbourhood’s elevated geography and the strong defensive fortifications established by Kurdish forces, further reinforcing the area’s political and administrative isolation from the rest of Aleppo. Military operations and concentrated shelling caused extensive destruction to already fragile infrastructure, especially in densely populated western Sheikh Maqsoud. In the absence of any formal urban planning, this infrastructure was replaced by ad hoc, emergency repairs carried out by residents simply to survive, pushing the current urban reality even further away from the planning schemes drawn up before 2011.

Following the displacement of Afrin’s residents in 2018 and the arrival of large numbers of them in Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maqsoud, these areas entered a new phase of social and political transformation, coinciding with shifts in the balance of military control in Aleppo. In this context, residents formed local councils affiliated with the primarily Kurdish Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria (AANES) alongside the establishment of local military committees that later joined the SDF. During this period, Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maqsoud became densely populated spaces of displaced and marginalised people, and a refuge for those fleeing compulsory military service or relying on limited remittances from relatives in Europe to secure their livelihoods. This made residents particularly vulnerable to siege tactics, pressure, and repeated extortion at regime checkpoints.

At the same time, the neighbourhoods witnessed notable social activity, including the formation of local committees to manage their affairs and the organisation of dialogue sessions and women’s forums focused on empowering the local community and promoting decentralisation as a viable political and administrative option. This experience continued until the fall of the Assad regime, prompting some SDF checkpoints to expand their deployment to the outskirts of these neighbourhoods as part of preliminary understandings with the new authorities. These were accompanied by negotiations on potential cooperation and participation in the management of some of Aleppo’s municipalities, as well as the establishment of joint checkpoints.

The night of the attack on Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh

These trajectories came to an abrupt end with the transitional authorities’ announcement on January 8 that negotiations were being terminated in Aleppo. This was followed by a large-scale military escalation, accompanied by retaliatory acts against civilians and combatants in the area, amid local estimates that dozens were killed. A local correspondent for The Syria Report confirmed that severe damage was inflicted on buildings that were already structurally compromised. In Ashrafieh, destruction was concentrated around Othman Hospital and the surrounding buildings, as these lie on the edge of the neighbourhood and at its highest point. A similar situation unfolded in Sheikh Maqsoud, where buildings overlooking the Christian cemeteries sustained heavy damage, including fires, large breaches in façades caused by shelling, and the complete destruction of some façades and terraces.

During sweep operations, Syrian government forces vandalised many homes, particularly Kurdish homes containing national symbols. This was accompanied by a new displacement of Afrin residents back towards their areas of origin, where the majority of their homes remain occupied by leaders of factions affiliated with the Ministry of Defence. Contact was also lost with hundreds of individuals who were arrested or abducted, marking a development that opens a new chapter in the long series of demographic changes and forms of marginalisation experienced by Aleppo’s Kurds at the hands of the state for decades.