By Alexander Whitcomb & Rekar Aziz ERBIL, Kurdistan Region--The German government will call for increased European Union aid to the Kurdistan Region, which is struggling to pay to shelter the hundreds of thousands of people who have fled there from the rest of Iraq, a German minister said on Thursday. “The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) convinced us that we should work with the EU to shoulder a broader responsibility in the crisis,” Gerd Mueller, German Minister of Economic Development and Cooperation, told reporters during a two-day trip to Erbil. The Kurdistan region is home to 862,000 people displaced by Islamic State (ISIS) militants, who launched an offensive against Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, in June, carrying out atrocities against Sunni, Shia, Christian and Yezidi populations as they seized roughly a third of the country. With approximately 1.4 million refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the region, the population has swelled by 30 percent, overwhelming the limited resources of the KRG - which has not seen its share of the budget for months due to ongoing disputes with the central government. “Aid from Baghdad is quite limited,” said Ali Sindi, the KRG Minister of Planning. “They send a few million for IDPs, but it simply doesn’t affect the situation. You cannot deal with the issue of IDPs when the host community has nothing.” Since aid agencies simply do not have the capacity to cope with the massive number of IDPs, they have relied on the generosity of Kurds and local charities to provide food, shelter, and support. “I know many of those who welcomed refugees were themselves living in dire economic conditions,” Mueller acknowledged, thanking the Kurds for their efforts and promising to help relieve their burden. Kurdish officials, the United Nations, and NGOs working in the region identified a $360 million funding gap in plans to prepare IDPs for winter. Any new funding would go towards emergency measures to be taken before November 15th, aiming to move many of the almost 400,000 people living in precarious conditions into 26 camps that provide shelter suitable for the cold and rainy winter months. Other objectives include the provision of food, water, basic medical supplies, as well as moving IDPs out of schools so that Kurdish children may resume their studies. Yet even these provisional steps will not be enough. The KRG and UN estimate that 166,000 individuals will remain outside of the new camps. Forty percent of the displaced are children and will need schooling of their own. There has been a measured increase in communicable diseases such as typhoid and hepatitis, and the treatment available for chronic diseases such diabetes and hypertension is limited. “The KRG can’t help the situation alone - it’s Iraq’s responsibility to help - and we can help both overcome the crisis,” Mueller said. “The most important message is that the Kurdistan Region needs peace.” Germany has provided millions of dollars in aid for Iraq through the United Nations, in addition to dozens of tons of direct humanitarian supplies to the Kurdistan Region. The second shipment of lethal military supplies arrived in Erbil yesterday, part of a delivery designed to outfit a 4,000 soldier brigade with sophisticated weaponry to fight ISIS in Iraq.
