ERBIL, Kurdistan Region— A group of 50 Kurdish migrants arrived in Erbil on Saturday from Germany where they had voluntarily asked authorities to deport them back to Kurdistan.
Some of the migrants had been on the road to Germany for months and others claimed to have spent as much as $20,000 to get there.
“I think thousands more will come back in coming weeks and months simply because it’s more comfortable to live in Kurdistan,” Ido Khider, a Yezidi Kurd told Rudaw at the airport referring to Kurdish migrants in Europe.
According to the Iraqi Ministry of Migration, some 25,000 people from Kurdistan region, mostly young men, have left the country as migrants since last year in hopes of asylum in a European country.
Kurdish authorities have tried to dissuade young people from migration and asked for patience in the face of economic crisis in the region.
With an average growth of 10 percent a year from 2005 till 2014, the Kurdistan region experienced a major economic transformation that led to better standards of living than the rest of Iraq, which had been plunged into a sectarian civil war.
Baghdad has withheld the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG)’s share of national budget since February 2014, leaving the KRG with mounting pressure from civil servants who have received their monthly wages only after repeated delays.
The KRG says maintaining 80,000 Peshmerga troops along the border to hold back ISIS militants and sheltering some 1.3 million refugees inside the region has added to its growing expenses.
“I still think being in a camp here is much more comfortable than waiting for hours only for some food in a European camp,” Khider said.
He said refugees from Syria are prioritized in the camps but even they face hardships as authorities struggle to accommodate greater numbers of migrants.
Another returning migrant, Samir Tahir, from Erbil, said the number of those who want to be deported to the Kurdistan region is growing every day.
“I think there are more Iraqi Kurds who want to be deported than those who really want to apply to stay,” Tahir said.
“By now the number is maybe about 5,000 people who have applied to come back,” he said.
German authorities have announced they will provide every deportee with a one-way return ticket and €1000 ($1,135).
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