By Pshtiwan Jamal ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - At least 327 mosques at an estimated cost of $30 million were built in the Kurdistan Region in the past two years despite the severe economic crisis, and many more are on the way, said the Kurdish religious ministry. “The cost of these mosques with the cost of those expected to be finished soon will stand at about $40 million,” Mariwan Naqshbandi, the ministry’s spokesman told Rudaw. The Ministry said that around the foundation work for 50 other mosques has been prepared. Most of them are built and funded by philanthropists, Naqshbandi said. The autonomous Kurdistan Region has been facing tough financial difficulties in the last two years due to a budget freeze by the federal government and a sharp decline in oil prices in the world market. According to Naqshbandi, the number of mosques in Kurdistan has increased from 5,010 in 2013 to 5,337. Most of the newly established mosques located in Erbil Province. Building a village mosque costs about $80,000-100,000 whereas in urban areas this cost reaches up to half a million dollars. “Building this big number of mosques in the course of two years of economic crisis is something odd,” said Naqshbandi. “How could people pay this huge money?” “We can say that a new mosque opens each week,” he revealed. The religious affairs ministry says that it has strict rules and regulations for building mosques which has been violated by some of the philanthropists. The distance between two mosques must be at least one Kilometer and the land no less than 2,000 square meters, and must be first registered as the Ministry’s property. “Some of these mosques in the cities are only 200m away from each other. Some neighborhoods have a lot of mosques while in some others there are none or not enough mosques,” said Naqshbandi, adding that that the ministry cannot resolve the issue because people who build the mosques are sometimes famous religious figures. Abdullah Saeed, of the Muslim Scholars Union agreed that “in some places the mosques are close to each other, or mosques have been built in neighborhoods where there was no need.” “In some places by building a mosque the philanthropist has helped government, so we appreciate their support,” Saeed added. Some believe that the region is in need of more schools and some money from building mosques would have been better donated to this end. Shorsh Ghafouri, the spokesman for the Ministry of Education says that the region needs at least 300 more schools and kinder gardens. “In the past two years a number of schools were built by the Kurdish government and people, but the number of philanthropists who would like to establish schools is really few,” Ghafouri said.
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