With olive harvest underway, obstacles remain for Afrin residents

With olive harvest underway, obstacles remain for Afrin residents

JENDERES — Kneeling beneath the generous branches of a decades-old olive tree, Agid Ahmad, 66, and his wife Fatima Khalil, 58, (pseudonyms) gather its small black fruits from the coarse, red earth. Working under the strong October sun, the couple chat lazily in their native Kurdish, sorting and tossing ripe olives into a large plastic bucket beside them.  It is harvest time in Afrin, a Kurdish-majority region of northwestern Syria. Afrin is home…