Kurdistan arrests over 100 for smuggling people from Iran to avoid quarantine
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Local Asayish (security) in the Kurdistan Region’s Sulaimani province have so far arrested over 100 individuals for attempting to smuggle people from Iran to the Kurdish autonomous region illegally to avoid being quarantined amid the outbreak of coronavirus in the region.
Since late February, tens of thousands of people from the Kurdistan Region and other parts of Iraq have traveled to Iran through Sulaimani province, Provincial Asayish Director Hassan Nouri told local media on Sunday.
According to Nouri, since the outbreak of the coronavirus in the Kurdistan Region, his forces in Sulaimani have arrested over 100 smugglers, who had received various amounts of money from others in neighboring Iran in exchange for bringing them back to the Kurdistan Region illegally to bypass the quarantine process enforced by local authorities as a measure to contain the pandemic.
Sulaimani, the second most populated province in the Kurdistan Region, shares a mountainous border with Iran that is over 220-kilometers long.
Nouri’s statement came at a time as concerns are on the rise in Kurdish social media over the lack of full control of Sulaimani’s border with its eastern neighbor by local security and guards that multiple kinds of smugglers have regularly taken advantage of for decades.
Acknowledging the impact of the Kurdistan Region's curfew in general, and the one in Sulaimani province in particular, Nouri said he expects the measure to be further extended throughout the region to stop the further spread of the coronavirus, as is being done by nations throughout the world.
According to the latest update by the Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) Ministry of Health, there are over 128 confirmed cases of the deadly virus in areas under its jurisdiction, including two deaths and 55 who have recovered.
More than 721,000 people are confirmed to have contracted the virus in over 180 countries worldwide, according to data compiled by WHO. Nearly 34,000 have died, as per official numbers reported by governments around the world, though the rate could be dramatically higher due to insufficient testing capabilities or underreporting.
On Saturday, police in the Kurdistan Region's capital of Erbil announced that they had seized five vehicles carrying 52 individuals as their drivers were attempting to smuggle them into the city from the direction of the disputed city of Kirkuk in violation of travel restrictions that are part of a regionwide curfew aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus.
Read More: PHOTOS: Police thwart attempt to smuggle 52 more people into Erbil during curfew
In the past week, the Erbil Traffic Directorate announced that it had foiled three separate attempts to smuggle people into the city during the strict coronavirus lockdown that restricts such movement of the general population, both within and between cities in the Kurdistan Region and Iraq.
Read More: Erbil security foils third attempt to smuggle people into city in one week
As in efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has ramped up checkpoint inspections throughout the Kurdistan Region, especially on roads from other parts of Iraq, to make sure all trucks are only carrying freight deliveries of food and other necessities.
Editing by John J. Catherine