photo: Eddy van Wessel

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Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Don’t waste money on reaching Europe unless you need refuge

Some 15,000 young men are said to have left the Kurdistan Region of Iraq recently for a better life in Europe. Slipping in with the bigger group of refugees from Syria, often posing as Syrians themselves, they took the dangerous road to the future.


Yet their situation cannot be compared to that of most Syrian refugees. These young men might have suffered from the fact that Baghdad has not paid the Kurdish region out of the national budget for the past three months, meaning that civil servants – over 75 percent of all workers – again did not get paid.


They may be fed up with the political situation in Kurdistan, where the conflict among the parties about an extension to the presidential term is slowing down most decisions. Or they may be fed up with living so near to the war.


Among themselves and within their families, young Kurds talk about the refugees entering Europe, and that they may be able to slip in too. Sometimes, parents even give their sons the money to pay smugglers for the trip.


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