UN says over 22,000 Iraqi citizens return home from Syria

BAGHDAD, Aug. 7 (Xinhua) -- Up to 22,300 Iraqi citizens have fled the violence in neighboring Syria during the past three months, in addition to 12,600 Syrian refugees, UN officials said Tuesday.

"There are 22,300 Iraqi refugees (in Syria) having been registered since July 18 until yesterday (Monday)" after having arrived in Iraq, Claire Bourgeois, representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Iraq, told a news conference here.

Bourgeois said 12,600 Syrian refugees have fled to Iraq as of Monday since the beginning of the year.

She said the UNHCR has registered some 87,000 Iraqi refugees in Syria as of late May, adding that "we expect that about 50 percent of them might return back to Iraq."

She also said the 87,000 is only a small number of the Iraqi population in Syria, and it is not known how many of the 22,300 returnees were registered as refugees in Syria.

For his part, the UN envoy to Iraq Martin Kobler told the news conference that the Syrian refugees and Iraqi returnees will add more problems to the government of Iraq and its people, which already have 1.3 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) who have been driven from their homes.

In mid July, the Iraqi government urged its citizens living in Syria to return after the increase of killings and attacks against them.

As for the Syrian refugees, the Iraqi government has built two camps to receive them, one in al-Qaim border area close to al-Qaim border crossing point in Anbar province, and another in Rabiea area close to the Rabiea border crossing point in Iraq's northern province of Nineveh.

In Iraq's northern semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan, the Kurdish authorities said they have prepared camps for Syrian refugees who cross the border, and the Kurdish regional government is cooperating with international and some local humanitarian organizations to offer various aids to the refugees, who are mostly Kurds and came from Syria's Kurdish cities adjacent to the Iraqi Kurdistan region.

Syria has been wrecked by bombings and violence against civilians since March 2011, when anti-government protests began. The unrest has claimed the lives of thousands of people, including large numbers of security force personnel. Enditem