EU pledges €22 million for displacement camps in the Kurdistan Region

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – A Kurdish official announced on Saturday that the EU has pledged over €20 million in new funds to support displacement camps located in the Kurdistan Region.

“The European Union has allocated €22 million (just over $25 million) to Syrian refugees in the Kurdistan region,” said the representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government to the European Union, Dalawar Akeji. 

He added that the funds would also be used to administer camps in the region that serve a large percentage of Iraqis who remain displaced since the emergence in Iraq of the Islamic State in 2014. Five years later, over 1.5 million of them continue to live in camps in the Kurdistan Region and Iraq. 

The Kurdistan Region also embraced hundreds of thousands of Syrians after the outbreak of the current conflict in 2011. 

The comments came during Ajeki’s participation in the EU’s annual meeting about humanitarian assistance in the Kurdistan Region’s many displacement camps.

On June 14, the UN announced that the EU had pledged an additional €2 million ($2.24 million) to make “critical infrastructure improvements” to three camps that house roughly 35,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Iraq’s embattled province of Nineveh.

Related Article: EU pledges additional €2 million for displacement camps in Iraq’s Nineveh

On Tuesday, the deputy head of the EU Advisory Mission (EUAM) in Iraq met with Iraqi border officials in Baghdad.

As part of EUAM Iraq’s current mandate, said a statement, “the Mission contributes to the implementation of a strategy on countering terrorism and organised crime with a specific focus on border management, financial crime, money laundering and protection of cultural heritage in Iraq.”