ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The US State Department on Thursday criticized Iraqi government efforts to identify and protect victims of human trafficking, saying the country does not meet the "minimum standards" of combating the crime.
The US State Department's Trafficking in Person report downgraded Iraq from Tier 2 in 2022 to Tier 2 Watch List in 2023, saying that despite "significant efforts" to comply with Trafficking Victims Protection Act standards, Baghdad had failed to do so.
Iraq is "identifying fewer trafficking victims, and they actually did not report law enforcement or all victim identification data. This is obviously concerning for us," Cindy Dyer, the US ambassador-at-large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons, told Rudaw's Diyar Kurda during a press conference on Thursday.
Dyer added that they have also flagged the Iraqi federal government's failure to provide "adequate protection services" for victims.
Countries listed on the report's Tier 2 Watch List are states that have a significantly increasing number of victims of severe forms of trafficking and which are not taking proportional efforts to address them, or their government has failed to provide evidence of their increasing efforts to combat this crime compared to the previous year.
Iraq is both a source and destination country for trafficking, exacerbated by insecurity and conflict. Victims in the Kurdistan Region include migrant workers, internally displaced people and refugees, women victims of the Islamic State (ISIS), and children, the Erbil-based NGO SEED Foundation found in a 2019 study.
The Kurdistan Region has taken steps to combat human trafficking, criminalizing it in 2018 and establishing anti-trafficking police units in all four provinces. However, many government actors still lack specialized training to identify and investigate potential cases.
