As of September 2023, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) hosts one million displaced people, including refugees from Syria, Iran, Türkiye, and Palestine, as well as internally displaced persons (IDPs) from elsewhere in Iraq. Syrian refugee numbers in the KRI have surged to more than 260,000, constituting 97% of all Syrians currently residing in Iraq (UNHCR Iraq Factsheet 2023). Additionally, some 40,000 non-Syrian refugees and asylum seekers have registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR) in Iraq. Of these, the KRI hosts 7,860 from Türkiye, 8,241 from Iran, and 615 from Palestine (Joint Crisis Coordination Centre 2023). The KRI also hosts approximately 700,000 Iraqi IDPs who have fled territories occupied by the Islamic State (ISIS) since 2014. Counted together, refugees and IDPs account for a 12% increase in the KRI’s population. Recent statistics (Joint Crisis Coordination Centre 2023) indicate that 1 in 5 people in the KRI was a refugee or IDP, a ratio higher than in Lebanon (1 in 6), Jordan (1 in 11), and Türkiye (1 in 28) (extracted from UNHCR’s Global Trends data). Often, the density of displaced people within the host community of KRI is obscured when statistics provided by the United Nations and other humanitarian actors are given for the whole of Iraq (where displaced people represent less than one in every 33 people).
Displacement is also highly visible within the landscape of the Kurdistan Region, with a total of 35 official camps for refugees and IDPs and many informal settlements in addition to urban displaced people (UNHCR 2020). While it has been noted that the authorities in refugee rentier states sometimes “adopt policies that extract revenue from other state or non-state actors in exchange for retaining refugee groups within [their] borders” (Tsourapas 2019), such dynamics still need to be explored for authorities associated with non-state and/or sub-state entities. The question of how this situation plays out in the context of the autonomous KRI, where the vast majority of Iraq’s refugees are to be found, leads us to reflect on: i) the relationship between humanitarian operations and the ability of de facto states or state-like governance systems to secure their own funding streams that circumvent the central state, and ii) the utility of humanitarian programming for displaced populations (both refugees and IDPs) within the politics of legitimacy for aspirant states. Indeed, analysis of these dynamics became all the more pressing in the context of, and subsequent backlash to, the 2017 independence referendum called by the leadership of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Adding to the emerging body of work on refugee rentierism, we also consider the parallel case of “IDP rentierism” (a new contribution to the literature) in the context of the
mass internal displacement crisis caused by the 2014 ISIS occupation of significant swathes of Iraqi territory.
This paper’s core research questions consider how the KRI authorities have instrumentalized the presence of refugees and IDPs, and assistance programs responding to their needs, in the pursuit of both financial independence and political legitimacy. Broadly drawing on reflections about refugee rent-seeking strategies (Lynch and Tsourapas 2024), we seek to map out the systematic steps taken by the KRI authorities to benefit from hosting refugeesand IDPs in the Kurdistan Region. With this in mind, we consider: i) how the KRI authorities have sought, and continue to pressure the international community to provide, humanitarian funding to fill their resources gap when hosting large numbers of refugees and IDPs in the post-ISIS context (especially when the KRI struggles to provide employment opportunities for its own, often disgruntled, youth population, many of whom are considering migrating out of Iraq); ii) how, in parallel, the KRI, like many MENA countries, has used the employment sponsorship (Kafala) system to generate a secondary income from refugees; iii) how the KRI has attempted to use “hospitality” for refugees and IDPs to gain legitimacy for its statehood aspirations, with refugees and their electoral votes being used to obtain greater representation in parliament and a larger budget from Iraq’s federal government; and iv) how the dynamics of earmarked funding has also created a hierarchy among refugees, for example by prioritizing Syrian over Iranian and Turkish refugees because of donor attention to their plight, further marginalizing the latter through processes that we elsewhere label as the “othering” of certain refugees (Yassen et al. forthcoming).
This paper contains a review of the available data from the KRG, including from the Joint Crisis Coordination Centre (JCC), which is the governmental entity responsible for humanitarian affairs and displacement policy under the KRG’s Ministry of Interior. We also studied media and financial reports produced by the KRG and donor agencies with a view to understanding the motivations behind programmatic and funding decisions. This methodology is complemented by semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders and individuals affected by funding and political contestation. We combined interviews with desk research to improve our understanding of the complex legal framework and procedures in place.