Nearly 40,000 People Emigrated from Kurdistan since January

SOUTH KURDISTAN (IRAQ)

MESOPOTAMIA NEWS : LEAVING KURDISTAN EN ROUTE EU & GERMANY

Basnews English 10/09/2019 – 12:31 Published in Kurdistan – ERBIL — Since the beginning of 2019, roughly 40,000 people have emigrated from Kurdistan, mostly moving to the western EU countries, a monitoring group said. Following the emergence of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria in 2014, a large number of people from Kurdistan Region joined the flow of Iraqi and Syrian migrants to find safety elsewhere.

Despite the victory over the jihadists group, prolonged security challenges together with economic hardship encourage more people to leave their home country.

Ari Jalal, head of Lutka Organization for Migrants and IDP Affairs, told Kurdistan 24 that the rate of emigration from Kurdistan Region is still high with 40,000 people who left their homeland in the past eight months. He explained that currently 15,000 to 20,000 migrants from Kurdistan Region are trapped in refugee camps in Greece and other transition countries.

According to Lutka statistics, at least 1,000 other Kurdish migrants are detained in Turkey as “irregular migrants”.