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AKRE, Kurdistan Region — Mohammed takes a puff of his cigarette and stares out over a big courtyard, still empty at 9 am. Soft yellow walls painted with the suns, rainbows, flowers and smiling faces you see on playground murals surround the square. One story up, the laundry on lines, satellite dishes in a row, the echoing calls from balconies are reminiscent of the sights and sounds of a council estate.
Mohammed lowers his cigarette and turns to us. “It’s pretty nice, huh?”
His home, the Akre Settlement, is one of 10 housing sites for refugees in the Kurdistan Region, housing a tiny fraction of the millions of Syrians who have fled their home country since the uprising of 2011 and the decade of chaos and upheaval that has followed. Their pursuit of refuge has led to death at sea and on land, separation from a home and family they don’t know if they’ll ever see again, and racist or xenophobic attacks when they get to what they thought would be their sanctuary.
This settlement has been open for seven years. It is lived in, and long term. It looks nothing like the images of sprawling refugee and IDP camps in the middle of nowhere that we are used to seeing. It is a former military barracks that the regime of Saddam Hussein also used to detain members of the Peshmerga, or people suspected of collaborating with them, and is now home to just over 1,000 people, the vast majority of whom are Kurds from northeast Syria (Rojava).
Mohammed leads us from the courtyard to a line of shacks housing grocery stores and a bakery, to a narrow, dimly-lit corridor, doors, sometimes curtains on either side opening up to homes. Mohammed’s first intention was to lead us to his place, but on the way we see his neighbour, Lina, who welcomes us all in for coffee.
Lina, who left the northeast Syrian province of Hasaka in 2013, lives alone in her housing unit, made up of a living room-bedroom, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The units in the settlement are all the same size and structure, be you one person or a family of six. They are made individual by their decorative details. At Lina’s, a red, heart-shaped frame around her television screen is a stamp of personality on her home.
We meet her a few hours before one in the afternoon, when she will begin work at the shop in the local court. Neighbours float into Lina’s home as we talk; she says that the settlement is just like one big home.
This sense of community is shot through the camp – weddings, funerals, newborn babies. The mother of Jihan, one of Lina’s neighbours who have paid us a visit, told us that when her mother died in Syria a few years ago, people living in the settlement came in their droves to pay their respects.
It has been ten years since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, when much of the nation rose up against dictator Bashar al-Assad and untold levels of destruction followed. Some 6.6 million Syrians have sought refuge abroad, according to the UN, the vast majority of them living in neighbouring countries.
The rest of the world sees 2011 as the beginning of upheaval and change, but Kurds from Syria have a different recollection of when rebellion hit the country’s streets. Jihan points to events in Qamishli in 2004, when clashes broke after a football match after Arab fans chanted in support of Saddam. The events at the match sparked fiery, deadly riots, its tinder the decades of mistreatment Kurds in Syria suffered under Baathist rule. The Kurdish language could not be taught at schools, or appear on shop signs, and thousands of Kurds were stateless.
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Though the Kurdish-majority northeast of the country was reportedly handed over to the Kurds by the Assad regime in 2012, it too has seen violent instability that makes going home seem an impossible objective for the near future. Jihan’s husband was killed by Islamic State (ISIS) militants in 2013 in Raqqa, on his way home to Hasaka after a trip to Beirut. ISIS would eventually take over a chunk of northern and eastern Syria, making Raqqa the centre of its exceptionally brutal rule in the country.
More recently, Turkey and its allied forces have taken hold of much of parts of Kurdish-controlled northern Syria, resulting in long, frequent cuts to basic services like water and electricity. To make the matter of instability even worse, a deal for Rojava’s autonomy still has not been reached with Damascus.
At Mohammed’s house, we meet his four children, aged between two and nine, and his wife. He worked his way up from making as little as 5,000 dinars a day as a construction worker to becoming a successful, self-employed electrician with his own employees, travelling for work across the Kurdistan Region – to Duhok, Zakho, and Erbil. He attributes his success to help from camp authorities, training from the UN’s economic agency (UNIDO), support from his neighbours, and the acceptance he’s received from the wider community.
“People hear me speak and think I’m from Akre – they have no idea I’m from Syria,” he said.
The success of Mohammed and others like him at the settlement are, in part, down to the services they are able to access. Children at the settlement go to a school that is shared with local children, and residents have access to the same healthcare facilities in the town as locals.
“In Akre, refugees have the same access as host community members,” said Firas al-Khateeb, spokesperson for UNHCR Iraq.
The UN applies an “alternative to camps” policy, but where that is not possible, “it is obviously more helpful if they are located in areas that have access to existing services, livelihood opportunities, and also allows for contribution of refugees to the overall economic, social, and cultural life of the community,” Khateeb said.
“In the end, successful integration while in displacement does not depend so much on location but on the rights refugees have to live normally… and, therefore, both benefit from and contribute to the economy and society providing them protection."
Akre’s mayor says that efforts to make refugees feel welcomed are part of a long, concerted effort by the town’s residents.
"Before the castle (settlement) was opened to refugees, people in Akre cleared their schools, their mosques, everywhere for them to have somewhere to stay,” he said. “There is no difference between us and the refugees, we are one and the same.”
According to January 2021 data from the KRG’s Joint Crisis Coordination Center (JCCC), there are almost 240,000 Syrian refugees in the Kurdistan Region. A study by Germany-based research centre KAS (Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung), published in January 2021, sought to look at how well Syrian refugees – Arab and Kurdish – have integrated in the Kurdistan Region.
“Many Kurdish refugees told me that people here are very welcoming, they said ‘ok, you’re Kurds’ – they did not necessarily see them as refugees,” said Mera Bakr, a research assistant at the Institute of Regional and International Studies at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani and lead for data collection for the KAS study/ “Many of them told me that they feel like this is their home.”
Refugees from Rojava are treated with a level of leniency unimaginable for refugees that are not Kurds, Bakr said.
“I interviewed a guy in Sulaimani who told me that he had lost all of his documents – he didn’t even have his refugee certificate… he told me that when he went to the Asayish (security forces) in Sulaimani and said he did not have his documents, they told him ‘you’re a Kurd’ and that he’d be fine… I don’t think they would have said the same if it was an Arab family.”
Unlike Mohammed, many Syrian refugees continue to be paid paltry sums for their physically draining work.
“When you ask them why they would work for 5,000, 10,000 dinars (approximately $3.50 to $7) a day, they say that they have no choice – it’s a tool that the business owners have to exploit them,” Bakr said.
It is the settlement’s manager, no less, who reminds us that life here is far from perfect. Though Matin Mohammed is new to his role, he is seasoned when it comes to running camps in the Kurdistan Region. He took the job at the Akre Settlement just weeks ago, and was part of a series of staffing changes made at the camp – perhaps part of why he is frank about the camp's shortcomings, pointing out flaws that residents were quiet about. The plastic walls in the housing units, though an upgrade from the sheets of nylon that the camp residents were met with when they first moved in, are not soundproof; "we're talking in here and people outside can hear us", he said.
As for the coronavirus pandemic, the number of coronavirus cases the camp has seen is officially registered as four, but "nobody got tested", and the number of cases the camp actually saw was actually far higher.
The settlement is not a home forever, and residents have gone on to live in Akre itself, to elsewhere in the Kurdistan Region, and overseas, camp manager Mohammed said.
The welcome from locals for the refugees is not shared by all in the town. We travel up the slope, towards the older parts of the city, and stop at the studio of Samir Akreyi, a photographer who has captured Masoud Barzani on film. Like many with anti-refugee sentiments worldwide, Akreyi believed the refugees had a duty to defend their homeland when it was in danger – and that Rojava is safe enough for them to move back to.
“Their areas [in Rojava] have no problems. Why don't they return? I want them to return.”
But for refugees at the camp, the likelihood of their permanent return to Rojava is slim and distant. They visit relatives and friends in Rojava who urge them to come home, but to no avail.
“Nobody sees a future for themselves in Rojava”, Lina said. “When I talk to my sisters back home, they tell me that things are bad.” The price of the dollar against local currency so high that they cannot afford basics like tomatoes – never mind invite guests over and maintain some sense of community. “Things are better here.”
May of those who are able to work do so not just to feed their families, but to raise the thousands of dollars needed to travel and try to seek refuge elsewhere, Bakr said.
“Almost all of them told me that they want to immigrate to Germany, and it was because of money that they could not immigrate.”
When conducting his research, he visited the home of an older couple, in their sixties.
“In the middle of the interview, their young daughter entered the room… when she found out that I am not there to help them immigrate to Germany, and she looked at me and said with disappointment, ‘you’re not helping us move to Germany?’... it just shows how desperate people are to leave.”
Mohammed says that if he were to return to Rojava for good that he would face two years of conscription for the Syrian Democratic Forces, though he already did two years of compulsory service for Syrian regime forces as a teenager. He has family in Germany, who said they would help him and the three kids he had at the time travel to and resettle there, but he decided not to risk a trip that has cost the lives of many other refugees.
“I didn’t want to make such a dangerous and expensive journey with the kids,” he said, his children sat on and around him.
We ask him where, ideally, he would want to settle down for good.
“In Akre,” he said with certainty. “A three or four-room house. Doesn’t need to be any bigger than that.”
Additional reporting by Karwan Faidhi Dri