Kobani (Ayn al-Arab)

Kobani, also known by its Arabic name Ayn al-Arab, is a district centre just south of the Turkish border. The town began beside a railway halt: in 1912 a simple station was built on the Baghdad Railway, and the settlement grew up to the south of it. Before the war its population was close to forty-five thousand.

Where the name comes from

Ottoman records call the place Arab Punar, the Arabs’ spring. The spring was a creek that ran east of the village, where Arab herders brought their flocks in summer. Ayn al-Arab is the Arabic translation of that name. One theory traces Kobani to the German railway company that built the line, from the word for company; the explanation is disputed.

The railway and the border

German engineers who stayed in the area in 1912 and 1913 described Arab Punar as a small village of domed mudbrick huts, about 35 kilometres east of the Euphrates. The station was built by workers from nearby Suruç. Armenian refugees settled in the new town around 1915. In 1921 the border was drawn along the railway, and the northern part of the settlement was left on the Turkish side. That part is Mürşitpınar, which still has a small station and a border gate. For years people from Kobani crossed there to catch the train to Aleppo.

The Mandate years and after

Much of the street plan was laid out and built by the French Mandate authorities. By the middle of the 20th century the town had three Armenian churches and two schools; many Armenians left in the 1960s for Soviet Armenia, Aleppo and Beirut. The small lake north of the town dried up in the same decade.

The siege and today

From September 2014 to January 2015 the town was besieged by the Islamic State group (ISIL). Most of the eastern neighbourhoods were destroyed and most of the population crossed into Turkey. Return and rebuilding began in 2015.

What is nearby

Arslan Tash, Shêran in Kurdish, is an ancient Assyrian site close by. In the summer of 1883 a French-led team on its way there was put up by Kurds living on the plain east of today’s town. Jarabulus and the station in Aleppo belong to the same railway story.

What most people miss

How the border and the town fit together. The line follows the railway, so the track that created Kobani is the same line that now separates it from its northern twin. The station side, Mürşitpınar, is in Turkey.