Tell Abyad is a town in northern Syria. It is the administrative center of the Tell Abyad District within the Raqqa Governorate. Located along the Balikh River, it constitutes a divided city with the bordering city of Akçakale in Turkey.
History
In antiquity, Tell Abyad and the surrounding region were ruled by the Assyrian Empire and settled by Arameans. Tell Abyad could have been the site of the neo-Assyrian–era Aramean inhabited settlement of Baliḫu, mentioned in 814 BC. Later, various empires ruled the area, such as the Romans, Byzantines, Sassanids, Umayyads, Abbasids and finally the Ottoman Empire. Tell Abyad remained Ottoman until the end of World War I, when it was incorporated in the French mandate of Syria during the partition of the Ottoman Empire.
The modern town was founded by French mandate authorities to control the border with Turkey, with first inhabitants being Armenian refugees from Anatolia, survivors of the deportations conducted during the Armenian genocide, with around 250 Armenian families living in the city prior to the Syrian civil war. After Armenians, the Baggara Arab tribe arrived as members of the French Levant army, and decided to stay and settle in the area.
Syrian civil war
After the Syrian civil war started in 2011, Tell Abyad was captured by the Free Syrian Army in September 2012, On June 30, 2014, Tell Abyad was captured by the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), who raised their flag at the border crossing with Turkey. After ISIL defeated the Kurdish forces, the YPG and Kurdish Front, ISIL fighters announced from the minarets of the local mosques that all Kurds had to leave Tell Abyad or else be killed. Thousands of civilians, including Turkmen and Arab families, fled on 21 July. ISIL fighters systematically looted and destroyed the property of Kurds and resettled displaced Arab Sunni families from the Qalamoun area (Rif Damascus), Deir ez-Zor, and Raqqa in abandoned Kurdish homes. According to Liz Sly of the Washington Post, ISIL also collected a tax from the Christians, a so called Jizya of about $100 every six months. While ISIL controlled the border towards Turkey in Tell Abyad, it was a major source for supplies coming in from Turkey.
In the June 2015 Tell Abyad Campaign, the town was besieged and in June 2015 taken over by forces of the Euphrates Volcano, the YPG and their allies within the Free Syrian Army.
Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria
After the capture of the Tell Abyad district, Kurdish YPG fighters have been accused by Syrian rebels of deliberately displacing thousands of Arabs and Turkmens from the areas they captured from ISIL forces in northern Syria — a charge strongly denied by the Kurds. The accusation was not backed by any evidence of ethnic or sectarian killings. The head of Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the people who had fled into Turkey were escaping fighting and there was no systematic effort to force people out. A report published by KurdWatch also accused the PYD of displacements while Liz Sly of the Washington Post reported:
According to KurdWatch, repressive measures have been taken out in first line against persons with ties to the Islamic State or other political opponents.
However, many of the tens of thousands of Arab residents — namely those tribes that allegedly took part in the expulsion of the local Kurdish population in 2013 — who fled the advancing Kurdish force have not returned, for fear of retribution from the YPG. There were reports that Kurds were forcibly removing the local Arab population, but the accusations were rejected by local Kurdish officials as well as the United Nations.
The Tell Abyad canton was established on 21 October 2015 and included into the de facto autonomous Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), declared by a council including representatives of local Arab, Kurdish, Turkmen and Armenian communities. The entity was neither formally recognized by the Syrian Government of Bashar al-Assad nor by any other country of the United Nations. The 178-member higher council that governed Tell Abyad, elected mixed-gender co-mayors, as mandated under Rojava rules. The elected co-mayors were ethnic Arab Mansour Seloum (later elected co-chairperson for the executive committee to organize a new constitution for Rojava, and replaced by ethnic Arab Hamdan al-Abad) and ethnic Kurd Layla Mohammed. The latter was 27 years old and the first female mayor of Tell Abyad ever. Schools in which Arabs and Kurds each could learn in their own language were set up during their administration.