BCF delivers food aid to 500 families in Kirkuk during Ramadan

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The Barzani Charity Foundation (BCF) on Monday announced the delivery of food aid to 500 families in need in Kirkuk province in coordination with the Korek Telecom company.  

In mid-March, BCF announced it had established a hotline in every city in the Kurdistan Region to provide food baskets to low-income families amid curfews imposed across the region to curb the spread of COVID-19, which caused a huge economic burden.

“On the occasion of the Islamic month of Ramadan, the BCF has begun to distribute food baskets to 19 provinces in Iraq, and today, we began in Kirkuk,” Asma Ameen, the head of BCF in Kirkuk, told Kurdistan 24.

Some families were not beneficiaries of the BCF hotline services, so “today, in Kirkuk, 500 food baskets are delivered to those families,” Ameen added.

As of today, the BCF has 2,000 beneficiaries in Kirkuk as well as 1,000 families in Chamchamal, she revealed. “Hopefully, before Eid [al-Fitr], the remaining families who contacted [BCF] previously will be provided with the aid,” the representative noted.

“Since the beginning of our mission in Kirkuk, we have never discriminated against any ethnicities,” Ameen said, citing the foundation’s continuous coordination with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) in assisting and exchanging data related to families in need.

“The BCF has a special program for assisting orphans in Kirkuk, in which more than 740 orphans are registered,” she said. “Today, we’ve also begun to pay their salaries, each of them gets paid $200.”

The BCF is one of the most active humanitarian NGOs in Kurdistan that often provides a substantial amount of aid to internally displaced persons and refugees in Iraq, the Kurdistan Region, and northern Syria, as well as multiple programs to enrich the lives of displaced children.

The organization was founded in 2005 and, in its own words, “strives to honor the great legacy of Malla Mustafa Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish Liberation Movement and influencer of the contemporary Kurdish nation.”

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany