DUHOK, Kurdistan Region - Nearly 25,000 Kurdish migrants who fled Turkey in the 1990s and settled in refugee camps across the Kurdistan Region are still without Iraqi citizenship despite numerous applications.
The families say they have been deprived of basic rights in the Region, such as education, work and healthcare, due to their underprivileged refugee status.
Under Iraqi laws, any foreign national who has lived in the country for a period longer than 10 years will be granted citizenship upon request.
"We have applied several times, but without any success," says Abdulkareem Yousef, a father of six whose children have all been born in the Kurdistan Region.
"Without Iraqi citizenship the future of our children is at great risk. Most of them have difficulty finding proper jobs because of that," Yousef said.
Fewer foreign nationals have been granted citizenship in Iraq since 2003 to prevent demographic imbalance in the ethnically displaced regions where naturalization of migrant groups could change the population makeup, according to official statements.
"We have asked both the Iraqi authorities and United Nations agencies here to assist us since we know that the migrants' conditions are very desperate," says the manager of the migration office in Duhok, Nizar Ahmed.
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