Thousands of Syrians stream into northern Iraq via new bridge: UN
Iraq, 17 August 2013: Thousands of Syrians fleeing the conflict in their homeland
have streamed into northern Iraq in a sudden movement across a recently constructed
bridge, the United Nations refugee agency reported on Friday.
Field officers
with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported the first group of some
750 Syrians crossed over the pontoon bridge at Peshkhabour at the Tigris River before
noon on Thursday, but in the afternoon a much larger group of 5,000 to 7,000 people
followed.
“The factors allowing this sudden movement are not fully clear to
us at this stage”, UNHCR spokesperson Adrian Edwards told reporters in Geneva.
Some
of the Syrians had reportedly been waiting near the Tigris River for two to three
days, camped at a makeshift site. UNHCR monitors at the border saw scores of buses
arriving on the Syrian side dropping off more people seeking to cross.
Edwards
said both the Syrian and Iraqi sides of the frontier at the Peshkhabour crossing are
normally tightly controlled.
The vast majority of the new arrivals are families,
mainly from Aleppo, Efrin, Hassake and Qamishly. Some families told UNHCR they had
relatives residing in northern Iraq, and some students travelling alone said that
they had been studying in northern Iraq and had only returned to Syria over the recent
Eid holidays.
“UNHCR and partner agency teams, together with local authorities,
worked into the early hours of this morning to aid the new arrivals,” Edwards said.
UNHCR thanked Iraqi authorities and particularly the Kurdistan Regional Government
for their involvement in negotiations to permit the new arrivals to cross and the
transport and other assistance that was provided at the frontier.
As of today,
almost 2 million Syrians have fled the war and registered as refugees or applied for
registration, with two-thirds of these having arrived this year. There are now more
than 684,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon, 516,000 in Jordan, 434,000 in Turkey, 154,000
in Iraq, and 107,000 in Egypt.
UNHCR has urged countries in the region and
elsewhere to keep borders open and to receive all Syrians who seek protection amid
the fighting that has so far claimed over 100,000 lives since it began in March 2011. Source:
UN