India, Feb. 16 -- A month after clashes rocked a Kurdish-majority neighbourhood in Syria's second-largest city of Aleppo, most of the tens of thousands of residents who fled the fighting between Government forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces have returned - an unusually quick turnaround in a country where conflict has left many displaced for years.

"Ninety per cent of the people have come back," Aaliya Jaafar, a Kurdish resident of the Sheikh Maqsoud neighbourhood who runs a hair salon, said Saturday. "And they didn't take long. This was maybe the shortest displacement in Syria." Her family only briefly left their house when Government forces launched a drone strike on a lot next door where weapons were stored, setting of...