The Afrin offensive (January–March 2018) was a military operation launched by the Turkish Armed Forces and the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army against the Syrian Democratic Forces in Afrin District in northwestern Syria as the initial phase of Operation Olive Branch. At the end of military operations, the UN had registered 150,000 Kurdish refugees in camps in the area of Tel Rifaat; the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) estimated that 300,000 people had been expelled in total. By May, SOHR estimated that 40,000 settlers had been moved into Afrin, some of them Arabs displaced from eastern Ghouta, but mostly families of the mixed Arab and Syrian Turkmen militias.