SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region – Fakria Faris sat weeping before a tent in a new transit camp for Syrian refugees in Iraqi Kurdistan, insisting she was brought by force and wants to return home.
“I don’t want to be here! My daughters have exams, we need to go back!” she said, her two girls weeping beside her.
Between tears, she explained that she and the girls had taken advantage of last week’s border opening with Syria to come and see her other daughter, who had been living at the Kurdistan Region’s overflowing Domiz refugee camp, and was about to give birth.
“We were forced into the bus that brought us here. I want to go back home!” she cried.
Faris is one of around 40,000 Syrian Kurds to arrive in Iraqi Kurdistan after the autonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq – already overwhelmed with an estimated 150,000 mostly Kurdish Syrian refugees -- reopened a border bridge over the Habour river a week ago.
Faris went to see her daughter at the Domiz camp--more than 350 kilometers from Sulaimani--and houses over 50,000 people in vastly overcrowded conditions, and was bussed from there to the newly-opened camp at Arbat for the latest arrivals.
Some of the tens of thousands of refugees who came over the bridge in the past week said their arrival did not mean they were here to stay. While the Kurdish authorities struggle to give everybody shelter, some people desperately want to return home.
Faris’ story is similar to many others. Around half the people in the Arbat Camp have been split from their families, or do not want to be here, said project coordinator Bakhtyar Ahmed of the Sulaimani aid organization CDO. “I even have people here who are company heads and need to return to business.”
For the moment, all of them are stuck, because during the registration process at the border their identity cards are taken. “I warn them that without their ID, they will be arrested at the checkpoints,” said Ahmed.
Faris and her daughters were among the first group of a hundred families that were moved from schools and mosques in Arbat to the camp, which will eventually house 500 families, or over 3,000 people.
Two other camps are also being built, one by the Kurdish government to house up to 10,000 refugees, and another by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for a maximum 10,000 people.
All of the new arrivals cited violence in their regions as the main reason for leaving their homes, although only one or two said they actually witnessed the atrocities that Islamic groups are said to have committed against Kurdish civilians.
With the civil war in Syria now in its third year, Kurdish groups there have largely managed to stay out of the fighting – until recently. Since last month, there have been fierce clashes between the armed wing of the dominant Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and jihadi fighters from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusrah.
The PYD is regarded as the Syrian wing of the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
Many of the refugees reported that their areas were not directly affected by the clashes. They said their main concern is the bad economic situation, with food prices rising – rice at around $9 a kilo - and electricity and water cut because of the war.
“We are poor here, but we were even poorer in Syria,” said Najima Bakir, 28, who fled from Derik and waited days at the border for the opening.
