AL BASOUTA, Syria (AP) \u2014 Abdul Rahman Omar fled his village in the Afrin district in northern Syria eight years ago as a Turkish offensive against Kurdish fighters swept across the area.<\/p>\n
Now he is among hundreds of Kurds who have recently returned to Afrin. He joined neighbors in celebrating the spring festival of Nowruz<\/a> for the first time since their return from exile, and for the first time after the government declared the celebration a national holiday.<\/p>\n Nowruz,<\/a> the Farsi-language word for \u201cnew year,\u201d is an ancient Persian festival that is also celebrated by Kurds in Syria, Turkey and Iraq as well as Iran. It is characterized by colorful street festivals and torch-bearing processions winding their way into the mountains. The 3,000-year-old festival is rooted in the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism and is marked by people across faiths including Zoroastrians, Muslims, Christians, Jews and those of the Baha\u2019i faith as well by millions in the diaspora.<\/p>\n Omar joined a row of young men and women in a line dance to a pounding beat Friday evening and then processed up into the hills above the village of al-Basouta hoisting torches and Kurdish flags, where they spelled out the word \u201craperin,\u201d meaning \u201cuprising\u201d in Kurdish, with flames.<\/p>\n The return follows a deal to integrate Kurds into the army <\/p>\n Afrin was seized by Turkish forces<\/a> and allied Syrian opposition fighters in 2018, following a Turkey-backed military operation that pushed fighters with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and thousands of Kurdish civilians from the area. <\/p>\n Turkey considers the SDF to be a terrorist organization because of its ties to the Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party, or PKK, a separatist group that staged a decades-long insurgency in Turkey. A peace process<\/a> is now underway.<\/p>\n Kurds who remained in Afrin complained of discrimination and human rights violations. Many who left were afraid or unable to return, because Arab Syrians displaced from other areas by the country\u2019s civil war had taken up residence in their homes.<\/p>\n Omar spent his years in exile in the Sheikh Maqsoud<\/a> neighborhood of Aleppo city. The neighborhood became a flash point in January in fighting between government forces and the SDF, which had built up a de facto autonomous region in northeast Syria during the civil war that began in 2011.<\/p>\n