Thousands of individuals from northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish area have risked their lives trying to reach Europe this year, including Asos Hassan.
Desperate to flee economic hardship and political repression, the 28-year-old university graduate from Koya, a village east of Erbil’s capital, attempted to cross the Aegean Sea to Greece twice but was turned back by Turkish officials.
Despite his failures, he intends to return to Turkey and try again until he gets his goal.
“I will keep at it even if I get deported dozens of times,” said Hassan. “I’d rather die than continue living this miserable life,” he added, explaining he has struggled to find employment for years and feels hopeless about the future.
Kamaran Aziz, a 21-year-old Halabja resident, sought to enter Europe through Belarus like Hassan, but was deported by local officials when his visa expired last week.
Aziz paid $6,000 to Kurdish smugglers to make the trek, but he was stopped and abused by Belarusian border police before being forced to return home. Aziz told reporter that if he had to try again, he would sooner die than stay in the Kurdish region.
The Kurdish region was home to many of the approximately 30 migrants who died trying to cross the English Channel last week.
Iraqi Kurds have also died on the Belarus-Poland border, with hundreds more stranded in sub-zero temperatures as they attempt to enter the European Union.
These tragic events have brought attention to the growing wave of migration out of the Kurdish region, leaving many people wondering why people would risk their lives to leave an area rich in oil resources and long regarded as a haven of stability and a model of development for the rest of the country.
The two young men, like other Kurdish exiles, expressed their dissatisfaction with high unemployment, unpaid salaries, extensive corruption, poor public services, and patronage networks related to two powerful families and their political organisations, which have ruled the region for decades.
“It’s impossible to find a job unless you’ve connections with the ruling elite,” said Hassan. “And if you try to call for your civil rights or participate in peaceful demonstrations, you just get fired at with live bullets.”
Over the last few years, the Kurdish area, which is ruled by the Barzani and Talabani dynasties and their Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union Kurdistan (PUK) parties, has experienced an increase in protests.
Thousands of Sulaimaniyah students came to the streets last month for several days, seeking the return of a monthly stipend that had been abolished seven years ago. After riot police attacked the students and used live bullets to disperse the gathering, the protests became violent.
Smaller protests expanded to other Kurdish cities, including Erbil, Halabja, Kalar, and Koya, while Baghdad held a sympathy demonstration.
The United Nations condemned “arbitrary arrests,” “unjust trials,” and “intimidation of journalists, activists, and protestors” in the region earlier this year.
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has blamed the increasing number of people leaving the Kurdish region on an influx of internally displaced people from across Iraq following ISIL’s 2014 takeover of large swaths of the country’s north, as well as decades of tensions between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Much of the international community considers the PKK to be a terrorist organisation, and it has used Iraq’s northern mountains as a base for its rebellion against Turkey. In northern Iraq, the Turkish army conducts cross-border operations and air attacks on the PKK on a daily basis.
Dindar Zebari, the KRG’s international advocacy coordinator, said in a statement last week that the arrival of over 700,000 internally displaced people from other parts of Iraq has been a cause of irritation for Iraqi Kurds, prompting many to “develop an inclination to quit the country.”
Hundreds of villages in surrounding areas where PKK fighters have clashed with Turkish forces have become deserted, he claimed, contributing to the rise in migration.
“Those who are migrating are telling false stories about living conditions in the Kurdistan Region and are being exploited … to tarnish the region’s reputation,” he told Al Jazeera. He said smugglers looking for material gain were also to blame.
Analysts, on the other hand, claim that the underlying causes for Kurdish migration are unrelated to the government’s research.
.“The main problem is the corruption, repression of freedoms and civil liberties, and lack of employment,” said independent Kurdish analyst Mahmood Yaseen Kurdi.
He denied that the influx of internally displaced persons (IDPs) or tensions between Turkey and the PKK, both of which “impact little settlements with only a few hundred people,” were to blame
“People are growing tired with poverty and unemployment. Even redevelopment has been limited to major cities like Erbil and Sulaimaniyah, but most areas remain poor, looking closer to Sadr City,” he added, referring to one of the most deprived areas in Baghdad.
Karim Nouri, Iraq’s central government’s deputy minister of migration and displacement, concurred. “The Kurdish region is experiencing a wave of migration because young people are finding it difficult to live freely and decently.”
The semi-autonomous region, which is known for its flashy tower blocks and open green spaces, has long been chastised for restricting freedom of expression, and the ongoing refugee crisis along the Belarus-Poland border has recently brought the issue of growing corruption, poverty, and financial mismanagement to the forefront.
The migrant situation has been a “cause of great embarrassment for the KRG,” according to Sulaymaniyah-based researcher Lawan Othman.
“Whether it’s the migration issue or recent protests, all these events are linked to a wider sense of frustration among Kurdish people,” said Othman.
“They reflect Kurdish people’s disapproval and rejection of their government and how it’s breached their sense of dignity and basic civil rights,” he added.
