ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – A senior Iraqi electoral official has said Iraqis will only be able to vote in upcoming provincial elections from their home cities – a rule that would prevent hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Iraqis from voting.
“Iraqis need to vote in their city, where their national ID card has been issued; otherwise they will not be able to vote,” deputy head of the Iraqi Independent High Electoral Commission Rizgar Haji Hama told Rudaw on Tuesday.
Figures announced today paint a dismal picture for the return home of Iraq’s internally displaced population, much of which lives in the Kurdistan Region.
According to the Kurdistan Region’s Joint Crisis Coordination Center (JCC), 763,277 displaced Iraqis currently live in the Region, JCC head Hoshnag Muhammed told Rudaw on Tuesday.
Estimates for the number of displaced people living in the Kurdistan Region vary. A UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) report in June 2019 put the number of IDPs at 678,312.
Islamic State (ISIS) took over vast swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014, displacing an estimated 6 million Iraqis from their homes. Five years later, there remain an estimated 1.6 million IDPs across Iraq.
In a bid to accelerate the return home of IDPs, the Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displacement is offering grants of 1.5 million Iraqi dinars to families who return home, it said on July 27.
But according to the JCC, displaced people in the Kurdistan Region - particularly those from Anbar, Nineveh and Saladin provinces - are reluctant to return home.
Thousands of displaced Iraqis have even returned to camps in the Kurdistan Region, fleeing continued violence and desperate living conditions.
“In the past 6 months, around 7,195 individuals who returned to their hometowns after the territorial defeat of ISIS have been displaced again, settling back in camps in the Kurdistan Region,” Muhammed said.
“The main reason the returnees are re-displaced is the lack of services and security in their hometowns,” he added.
The figure is corroborated by the June 2019 IOM report which stated that at least 7000 people returned to camps in the Kurdistan Region due to a lack of basic services in their hometowns.
Though ISIS was territorially defeated in December 2017, reconstruction in areas they once held has been slow, and many of their former strongholds remain uninhabitable.
Remnants of the group continue to wreak havoc in Iraq’s disputed territories, from where many IDPs fled, having resumed their earlier insurgency tactics including ambushes, bombings, kidnappings and agricultural arson.
Iraq’s parliament recently agreed to hold provincial council elections across Iraq on April 1, 2020.
The Kurdistan Region will not take part in the upcoming vote, as it holds its own provincial elections.
