Manbij

Manbij is a city in the northeast of Aleppo Governorate in northern Syria, 30 kilometers west of the Euphrates. In the 2004 census by the Central Bureau of Statistics, Manbij had a population of nearly 100,000. The population of Manbij is largely Arab, with Kurdish, Turkmen, Circassian, and Chechen minorities. Many of its residents practice Naqshbandi Sufism.On the course of the Syrian Civil War, the city was first captured by rebels in 2012, overrun by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in 2014 and finally captured by the Syrian Democratic Forces in 2016, bringing it into the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. Since 2018, after an agreement with the SDF, the Syrian Arab Army has been deployed on the city's periphery as a buffer between the Turkish occupation of Northern Syria and the AANES.