ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Since late last month, over one thousand new Syrian Kurdish refugees have arrived in the Kurdistan Region, adding to close to 250,000 other displaced Syrians the region hosts.
In a Twitter post on Sunday, the Kurdistan Region’s Joint Crisis Coordination Center (JCC) said “40 refugees arrived” through the Sehela border crossing. They are being accommodated at the Bardarash camp located in Duhok Province.
The Kurdistan Region is now hosting a total of 21,101 refugees who fled northern Syria in mid-October when Turkey launched a cross-border operation against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
On January 24, the number was at 20,011 according to the JCC numbers then. This brings the total of arrivals in about a month to around 1,100 people. According to the recent JCC figures, there are a total of 242,944 Syrian refugees living in the autonomous Kurdish region.
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) says that it needs close to $1 billion annually to sustain aid to over one million refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) living in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) who fled their homes to escape violence and instability.
The current camps in the Kurdistan Region were built as a rapid response to the crisis of refugees and displaced persons that followed the sudden rise of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2014.
Despite the passage of over two years since Iraq’s declaration of victory over the terrorist organization, there are still over 327,000 “families” who remain displaced within the country, according to the latest figures by the Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displacement.
About 565,256 families have returned to their places of origin, local media Shafaaq quoted as saying a ministry official, Amir Abbas Zaghir. This is about 63 percent of all families which were displaced since the outbreak of the war against the Islamic State’s territorial claims in Iraq, he added.