Local officials in Duhok have announced a project to build block structures and replace the current tents at the camp of Syrian refugees to help endure the cold of the winter.
“No tents will remain for Syrian refugees across the...camps and instead block-built houses will be constructed for them,” the local official told Rudaw correspondent Peshawa Bahlawi. “We will finish them in two months.”
The Domiz Camp shelters mostly Kurds displaced from their enclave of Rojava in Syria. Tents being used at the camp will be removed, he added.
A Kurdish family described the project as important for them amid continued cold winter waves, saying they cannot wait until the project is finished.
“Due to the rain and cold, we would close a gap, [but] another pops up. We patch the tents, but they rip apart again because they are all worn out,” Khaliya Sheikhmus, an older woman living under a ripped tent at Domiz Camp, lamented.
So the utility of the 1,200 tents for the Syrian refugees at Domiz and the 200 at Faide Camp decreases day after day.
Razwan Rasheed, the father of eight said they cannot wait to see when projects are finished because it will improve their living conditions.
Duhok Province’s Board of Humanitarian Affairs is responsible for the project.
More than 600,000 refugees who fled war in Iraq and Syria have taken shelter at nearly 23 camps since 2013 in Duhok city which has a population of about 800,000.
Most of the displaced Iraqis came from ISIS-held territories in the central provinces. The KRG puts the total number of refugees sheltered in the Kurdistan Region throughout the ISIS war at 1.8 million with at least 200,000 from Syria and Turkey.
http://www.rudaw.net/english/kurdistan/241220171
