ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) officially launched a dedicated crisis center this week, designed to identify unfolding emergencies after a calamitous year that witnessed war with the Islamic State, an influx of over a million internationally displaced Iraqis into the region, a severe budget crisis, and fuel shortages. The center, known as the Joint Crisis Coordination Centre (JCC), will be the first of its kind in the Kurdistan region, Interior Minister Karim Sinjari told an audience attending the public launch of the event on Sunday. “The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) lacked a mandated department to continuously monitor developments, facilitate response planning and coordinate across KRG ministries and departments as well as national and international partners to mitigate, manage and respond to the current and future crises,” Sinjari said. He said that the idea for the center came in June, when the Islamic State’s blitz on Mosul and the subsequent flight of hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) from the area into Kurdish territories highlighted the need for efficient and fast emergency response. Discussions between the Ministry of Interior and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq led to formal legal approval in January and many months of training before the launch. The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency the United Kingdom Department for International Development, the Japanese government, and the United Nations all offered resources and expertise to develop a small local team. While there has been urgent need for such a center for almost a year, Sinjari insisted he refused to open the JCC before it was operating according to international standards. “The inauguration was delayed to offer the center enough time to recruit and train its staff,” he said, making clear that its employees are now monitoring the region 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Even so, he told government officials and international partners that “further resources and capacity building will be required to bring the JCC to its full operational capacity.” He said continued training, equipment, and staff will be needed to monitor a region under pressure from multiple fronts. The center will need this additional investment because it must not only monitor the region’s humanitarian emergency—as much as a quarter of the population of the KRG is displaced or a refugee—but it must cover any other type of crisis, be it fire, flood, riots, fuel shortages, or recent rumors about Erbil airport closing and poisoned watermelons. It must provide analysis, policy advice, and mobilize money and often knotty logistics between its multiple partners for fast response. The JCC will also have to sync its response with the KRG’s notoriously labyrinthine bureaucracy along with a host of international actors working in the region—itself an arduous task for the JCC’s 12 full-time employees. Speaking on behalf of the United Nations Development Program, Lise Grande insisted the longer-term goal of the JCC would be to make sure the KRG was prepared for future disasters on a number of levels. “Emergencies can happen at any time or place. Preparedness means taking steps to strengthen the institutions, people and business resilience to humanitarian emergencies and any future man-made or natural hazards,” she said. The United Nations has launched “humanitarian operation centers” in Erbil and Baghdad, both of which will operate parallel to the JCC and are tasked with similar functions, albeit with a narrower scope pertaining to IDPs and refugees. In a region where many actors, both from the government and international community, have been criticized for performing redundant activity and studies, observers hope that the two centers will be able to share data, especially at a time when both the KRG and the UN are desperately seeking additional funding.
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