Years after IS, Kurds rebuild Kobane alone
KOBANE, Syria: After giving up on getting help from Syrian Kurdish authorities, Ahmed Saleh relied on relatives abroad to repair his home in Kobane after it was heavily damaged in a battle against militants. Much of the border town along Syria’s northern frontier with Turkey was left in ruins after US-backed Kurdish forces ousted the Islamic State group from it in early 2015. Saleh fled to Turkey in the battle’s early stages and came back a year later to find two of his home’s three rooms destroyed. “We returned to Kobane after the battles had stopped and were shocked by the huge destruction in the town,” Saleh said.
The one-time shoe repairman hoped authorities would step in, but said he eventually “lost hope”. “We had to live in these homes and we weren’t going to wait for these empty promises,” said the 45-year-old. Instead, he turned to family members abroad, who sent remittances. “My son in Germany and my brother in Iraqi Kurdistan helped me so my children and I could return home,” he
said. So far Saleh has spent the equivalent of $1,150 fixing up his house, little by little. All it needs now is a final coat of paint. Other homes in his eastern neighborhood of Butan have also been roughly restored. Bullet holes are still visible, but many walls have been reerected and painted.
‘No one helped us’
Mohammad Naesan, who lives in the nearby Martyr Kawa district, repaired his one-storey house by hand and with his own savings. “Our home was completely destroyed by IS,” the 76-year-old Naesan told AFP, clutching a Quran and sitting on his front stoop with his wife and children. “The municipality came and recorded all the damage to the buildings. But then they didn’t do a thing,” he said. “No one helped us. Rebuilding was so expensive, and it cost me a lot.”
Central government forces withdrew from Kurdish-majority areas in northern Syria in 2012, leaving local authorities to set up semi-autonomous institutions. As IS began grabbing swathes of northern Syria it attacked Kobane in late 2014. The four months of fighting it took to push the militants out pulverized about half the city, mostly in its north and east, said Anwar Muslim, the town’s top official. “Five thousand homes were destroyed in Kobane, about 70 percent of which have been rebuilt,” Muslim told AFP. He said remittances were crucial for rebuilding individual homes as authorities did not have the budget to help.
They focused instead on rehabilitating the gutted infrastructure, bringing water and electricity to residents, and rebuilding a dozen schools. But power cuts and water shortages remain rampant and Muslim said he felt disappointed by the lack of support from the US-led coalition, the Kurds’ key partner in the anti-IS fight. “So far, the coalition hasn’t provided any support despite us speaking dozens of times about the fact that, as we beat IS together, we should rebuild together,”