The Refugee Brief, 22 October 2019
| | Syrian refugee arrivals to Iraq reach 7,000 in seven days. A week after the first refugees began crossing into Iraq from north-east Syria, UNHCR reports that 7,100 have now arrived. Three out of four are women and children, including unaccompanied children. UNHCR spokesperson Andrej Mahecic said some of the refugees had witnessed explosions and shelling and were in need of psycho-social support. Most of the new arrivals are being moved to Bardarah refugee camp, some 140 kilometres from the border. Reuters reports that dozens of families displaced by the fighting in Syria's northeast are stuck at the border with Iraq, prevented from crossing by Kurdish forces controlling the area who are only letting through the wounded. |
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Samos mayor calls rally to protest overcrowding at reception centre. Greek authorities on Monday transported nearly 700 asylum-seekers from the island of Samos to the mainland, while the island's mayor appealed to residents to join a rally calling on the central government to accelerate decongestion of the Vathy reception centre, which is currently hosting over 5,500 people in facilities designed for 660. Mayor Giorgos Stantzos said the island was experiencing "an unprecedented and tragic crisis, which has totally upset the normality of our lives". The rally comes a week after a fire at Vathy that followed clashes between two groups of asylum-seekers. A Greek official told Reuters another 300 people would be moved from Samos this week and up to 2,000 from all outlying islands next week. |
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Local authorities cut water to Bosnian camp for refugees and migrants. Local authorities in the Bosnian town of Bihac, near the border with Croatia, on Monday said they would no longer pay for water delivery and garbage collection for the nearby Vucjak camp, where more than 2,000 refugees and migrants are living. The mayor of Bihac last week warned that he would cut off all funding for the camp to pressure the government to move some of the refugees to other parts of the country. AP reports that many residents were seen walking out of the site with empty plastic bottles on Monday to beg for water from locals. UN agencies and the EU have called for the closure of the Vucjak camp and warned of a "humanitarian emergency" if aid to the camp is cut off. |
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Afghanistan struggles to find housing for returning refugees. As Afghanistan's 2.6 million registered refugees gradually return to their country – many of them settling in cities where they have the best prospect of finding jobs – the government is faced with the challenge of housing them. A senior official told Reuters that the government is trying to formalize informal settlements in urban areas where many returnees end up by issuing residents with "Occupancy Certificates" that protect them from eviction for five years and eventually allow them to apply for land titles. The government is aiming to give the certificates to 1 million informal settlers over the next three years and to build more low-cost housing for returning refugees in rural areas. |
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Yemenis see water supplies cut amid fuel crisis. Some 15 million people in Yemen have had to drastically reduce their daily water consumption because of a fuel crisis, aid agencies said today. Fuel shortages caused by import controls saw fuel prices soar in September, affecting both piped water systems and four million people – many of them displaced and living in camps – who depend on water trucked in by private companies. In three major cities, Ibb, Dhamar and Al Mahwit, home to around 400,000 people, central water systems have been forced to shut down completely, according to Oxfam, which warned that lack of clean water could cause a resurgence of cholera. |
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Olympic runner Yiech Pur Biel writes for a Kenyan newspaper, the Daily Nation, about taking up football, and later running, at Kakuma refugee camp, as an escape from his memories of being separated from his family in South Sudan as a boy. Running brought him peace of mind, but it also reunited him with his mother and siblings when they saw him taking part in the 2016 Olympics in Rio. |
Some 33,700 refugees and migrants are now staying on Greece's Aegean islands, including 2,214 who arrived last week. |
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