This March some 400,000 people fled the northern Syrian city of Afrin. Departing mostly on foot, they took whatever they could carry. By night families with young children slept along the roadside in hostile and contested territory. Even as they fled, they were targeted by the same Turkish planes that had already cut off Afrin’s water and electricity supplies and destroyed its last hospital.

Those who sought refuge in neighboring Shahba province found it blockaded by both Syrian government forces and Islamist rebels. Humanitarian relief was kept out; people with life-threatening diseases and injuries were kept in. Many who sought refuge in abandoned homes were maimed and killed by landmines that ISIS had planted as it retreated. Infrastructure was destroyed and most water was contaminated. The food supply was unreliable. Children and the elderly died of diseases that have been eradicated across most of the world.

Those who stayed in Afrin fared little better. Islamist rebels kidnapped, tortured, and disappeared civilians, looted everything they could carry, forced the last remaining Yazidis to convert to Islam, and extorted money from prisoners’ families in ISIS-style execution videos. The new occupiers themselves imposed demographic change and extended “Turkification” policies from Turkey’s Kurdish southeast into northern Syria.