Kurdistan still hosts nearly 1 million refugees

Shafaq News – Erbil

Almost one million refugees are still living in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, the Regional Government (KRG) revealed on Monday, more than a decade after the area became a hub for those fleeing conflict in Syria and the advance of ISIS.

Speaking at a migration governance conference in Erbil, organized with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Crisis Coordination Center Director Sarwa Rasul said the region currently hosts 27 camps sheltering 858,578 people, most of them Syrians. An additional 280,175 refugees live in cities across the region, along with 261,939 displaced Iraqis, 7,240 Turks, 8,791 Iranians, 1,005 Palestinians, and about 1,200 people of other nationalities.

Rasul added that nearly 198,000 refugee families inside and outside the camps spend close to $1B annually on living costs — an average of $2.6M a day.

Since 2009, Kurdistan has received successive waves of displaced people, including more than a million Syrians and over two million Iraqis who fled northern and central areas after ISIS captured large swaths of territory in 2014.