#Frederike Geerdink#
Mysteriously, the eagle statue in Kobani’s central Freedom Square was still on its feet, just like the tall, slender minaret of a mosque not too far from the square. Around it, the destruction of the city seemed complete. Ismet Sheikh Hasan, defence minister of Kobani’s Kurdish regional administration stood among the rubble and said: “We call on the youth from Kobani who found refuge in Turkey to return home. We need to clean the streets”.
It was last Monday that Kurdish forces declared that the town was free of Islamic State (Isis) fighters. Walking around Kobani on a drowzy afternoon a few days later, you could only think of the tens of thousands of refugees who crossed the border into Turkey around four months ago, when Isis intensified its siege on the city using heavy arms taken from the Iraqi army. Many of the displaced wanted to go home, probably unable to imagine the destruction that would greet them.
“We could live in a tent”, Mustafa Derwish, a refugee in the Turkish border town of Suruc, told The Independent on Sunday, imagining his return.[1]