Schools will be closed from March 13-25, the education ministry said in a statement released Wednesday.
The decision to lengthen the usual spring holiday for schools, usually a week long, was made at a meeting of the Kurdistan Region’s coronavirus crisis cell on Wednesday.
Students in the twelfth grade at both public and private schools are exempt from the extended break.
Schools for refugees that answer to Iraq’s Ministry of Education but are in the Kurdistan Region will also be shut for the 13-day period.
The measure comes amid a continuing spike in coronavirus cases in the Kurdistan Region, with the KRG health ministry announcing on Wednesday that 335 cases of the virus had been recorded in a single day.
Kurdistan Region schools have been ordered shut and re-opened several times over the past year by the government due to the pandemic. They were last reopened on February 7.
The reopening of schools in early February was followed two weeks later by the discovery of a number of cases of the UK coronavirus variant in the Kurdistan Region.
The KRG health ministry has recorded 111,516 cases, including over 3,540 deaths, since the start of the pandemic.
