The modern-day 'Afrin District (Mintaqat 'Afrin) in the northwestern corner of Aleppo province is among the oldest areas of Kurdish settlement in Syria. Named for the 'Afrin River (the Aprê or Oinoparas of antiquity) and the new town of 'Afrin built as a local administrative centre under the French Mandate in the 1920s, the district encompasses the southern portion of the inland massif colloquially known as the "Kurd Dagh" (from Turkish Kürd Dağı; "Mountain of the Kurds") or Çiyayê Kurmenc, and formally associated with a Kurdish tribal population since at least the region's incorporation into the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. The object of this contribution will be to trace the political-administrative history of the ʿAfrin district from this time through the late nineteenth century on the basis of Ottoman archival records, in order to show that the Ottoman government consistently recognized and sought to extend the local Kurdish population a high degree of autonomy as such. The study draws on both central government sources (principally Tahrir tax cadastres, Mühimme executive decrees and Şikayet complaint decisions) and provincial shar’iyya court records from Aleppo, Antioch and Hama that provide clues on the fiscal organization, local leaderships, brigandage and police measures in the district (nominally divided into the cantons of Ravendan, Cûm and Amik) throughout the period of Ottoman rule. The first part reviews its official incorporation, in the sixteenth century, as the “province of the Kurds” (liva-ı Ekrad) and attribution, along with the governorship of Kilis, to the Kurdish Canpolat family. Following the end of the rebellion of ‘Ali Canpolat in 1607, however, these sources suggest that local authority was left largely in the hands of the Oqçî-Izzeddinlo and Qiliçlî confederations, the former likely derived from an originally Yezidi rival to the Canpolats, and the latter constituting a private fiscal reserve of the imperial Valide Sultan complex in Üsküdar, Istanbul. The study will conclude with an examination of attempts to reassert more centralized control over the region in the Tanzimat and Hamidian period, suggesting that the Ottoman government nevertheless continued actively to cultivate local Kurdish notables as state intermediaries in the district.