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Kurdistan
Bardarash camp in Duhok province is home to 6,823 people who fled Turkey’s October 2019 offensive in northern Syria. File photo: Rudaw
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is providing displaced Iraqis and refugees cash support to help them buy COVID-19 protection items like latex gloves, face masks and sanitizers.
Although Iraq and the Kurdistan Region have confirmed 1,680 coronavirus cases since the outbreak began, there have fortunately been no infections recorded in camps for refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs).
This does not mean they have been spared financial hardship as a result of the pandemic.
The Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) imposed a lockdown in mid-March, shutting down schools, ministries, and local businesses and suspending traffic within and between cities.
To prevent the virus spreading to the camps, where residents live in close quarters with limited sanitation utilities, local authorities decided to prevent anyone leaving – costing many camp residents their jobs.
UNHCR began distributing cash in Basirma refugee camp in Erbil on April 15 to help residents buy virus protection items. The agency warned on April 17 that these people are “at a higher risk due to their difficult living conditions.”
“To mitigate these risks, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, decided to help more than 110,000 vulnerable families (more than 550,000 people) from the refugee, internally displaced, and returnee communities in Iraq by providing them with cash so that they can purchase basic hygiene items to prevent the spread of COVID-19,” read a statement from the agency.
Each family is provided with 240,000 Iraqi dinars ($195).
The aid was distributed in Bardarash camp over the last few days. The camp is home to 1,700 Kurdish families (6,823 individuals) who fled Turkey’s October 2019 offensive in northern Syria.
UNHCR “is supporting the refugees and the internally displaced people and returnees with cash in order to enable them to buy their needs, like [latex] gloves, [face] masks and sanitizers so that they can protect themselves from [corona]virus,” Rasheed Hussein, a UNHCR representative, told Rudaw on Thursday.
The agency will also distribute money to those living outside the camps, but “only target the families that are very vulnerable and are in need of this support.”
However, many cash-strapped refugees say they are using the money to buy daily essentials rather than virus protection items.
“What does 240,000 [dinars] cover? If you go to the bazaar, you will spend 250,000,” Najiya Mohammed, a camp resident, told Rudaw.
“We came here and lost all our money,” Gulistan Abdul-Latif, another refugee, told Rudaw, tears in her eyes. “Everything is expensive here. Not just 240,000, even 400,000 does not suffice [for a month].”
There are around 1.4 million IDPs and refugees in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, according to data from IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix. The Kurdistan Region alone is home to 1,052,425 displaced people: 787,705 of them IDPs and 264,720 refugees, mostly from northeast Syria (Rojava), according to the Region’s Joint Crisis Coordination Center (JCC).
Both UNHCR and IOM have appealed for more than $46 million to contribute to curbing the spread of COVID-19 in Iraq.
“This scale-up aims to ensure that vulnerable refugee, IDPs, and returnee families have access to basic hygiene items in addition to conducting essential activities including health promotion and awareness-raising, provision of medical equipment, training of health workers, strengthening health care services and disinfection activities in camps and support early detection of positive cases,” UNHCR said in a statement.
In addition to halting the spread of the virus, IOM wants to use donated funds for “mitigating the impact of the outbreak including the socio-economic impact.”
“There are large IDP, refugee, returnee, and migrant communities in Iraq that already face challenges accessing healthcare and relevant information, and are still recovering from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) crisis and subsequent economic downturn,” said IOM Iraq Chief of Mission Gerard Waite.
Additional reporting by Ayub Nasri
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