[4] After Armenians, the Baggara Arab tribe arrived as members of the French Levant army, and decided to stay and settle in the area.

[3] After the Syrian civil war started in 2011, Tell Abyad was captured by the Free Syrian Army in September 2012,[5] On July 30, 2013, Tell Abyad was captured by the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), who raised their flag at the border crossing with Turkey.

[7][8] ISIL fighters systematically looted and destroyed the property of Kurds and resettled displaced Arab Sunni families from the Qalamoun area (Rif Damascus), Deir ez-Zor, and Raqqa in abandoned Kurdish homes.

[8] According to Liz Sly of the Washington Post, ISIL also collected a tax from the Christians, a so called Jizya of about $100 every six months.

[10] On July 21, 2013, the sounds of the minarets suddenly rose from the mosques of Tal Abyad, broadcasting a message calling on Kurdish civilians to leave their homes within a period of “10” minutes, and thus the city witnessed the largest forced displacement process.

They have also unilaterally detached it from the existing Syrian province of Raqqa and made it a part of their newly formed autonomous enclave, carved from areas traditionally inhabited by Kurds but steadily encroaching also on territories that were historically Arab.

[24] The 178-member higher council that governed Tell Abyad, elected mixed-gender co-mayors, as mandated under Rojava rules.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, there was not any infiltration from the Turkish border but dormant IS sleeper cells and others entered the town on the eve of the offensive dressed in YPG uniforms.

[26] There have been multiple other instances of ISIL terror attacks in Tell Abyad, for example on 29 June and 8 July 2016 two bombings that each claimed ten civilian lives.

[31] Tell Abyad was also a hub for Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve training of new SDF recruits in the fight against ISIL in Syria.

[32] On 27 November 2018, as a part of a deconfliction initiative with Turkish forces in the area, the US set up an observation post in Tal Abyad.

[36] As part of the Turkish offensive into north-eastern Syria, Turkey launched airstrikes and fired artillery at SDF position inside the town.

[3] The Democratic Union Party (PYD) formed a council of elders in Tell Abyad which has the task to administer the region and which is said to be "a fair representation of the ethnic composition of the town" and the Arab majority population.