GENEVA – Syrian refugees continue to stream over the border into northern Iraq, where the Kurdistan regional government has put in place a daily quota of 3,000, aid agencies said on Tuesday. About 30,000 refugees, believed to be mainly Syrian Kurds, have poured into Iraq since Thursday, and up to 3,000 are lined up to cross on Tuesday, the United Nations agency UNHCR said. “The Kurdistan regional government authorities have put a daily quota for those refugees who will be allowed in. Today they will allow 3,000 persons in, but yesterday a similar quota of 3,000 was set but at the end of the day, 5,000 refugees were allowed to cross,” Jumbe Omari Jumbe of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) told a news briefing in Geneva. A sudden mass influx of 30,000 Kurdish refugees from Syria into Iraq increases the likelihood that Iraq's Kurdish region will act to protect its kin across the border, an adviser to Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani said on Monday. The United Nations said nearly 30,000 refugees had crossed in the past few days, making it one of the biggest single outward migrations of a civil war that has killed more than 100,000 people and driven millions from their homes. “It is a massive movement of people,” Dan McNorton, spokesman of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told Reuters on Monday. The UN agency has sent trucks loaded with emergency supplies and erected plastic tarpaulins at a transit site to provide shelter from the sun and heat. A refugee camp is expected to open by the end of the month, McNorton said. Refugees who crossed a newly built metal pontoon bridge spanning the Tigris river said they were fleeing attacks by the Al-Nusra Front.“There are bodies without heads at the morgue today. Why? Which international norms and which doctrine can justify their death? They are cutting off heads. Heads of children are being cut off,” said Faris Sulaiman, a refugee who fled from Qamishli in northeast Syria. “The Al-Nusra Front have permitted the killing, the slaughtering of the Kurdish people,” he said. — Reuters
