DAHUK, Iraq — According to UNHCR official statistics, 214,372 Syrians, many of them Kurdish, have fled to Iraq as a result of the Syrian revolution, with 98% of them living in the Kurdistan Region. “Forty-five percent of Syrian refugees are living in the camps and 55% are non-camp residents,” Youssef Mahmoud, the public information associate at the UNHCR, told Al-Monitor.
According to Mahmoud, the latest crises in Iraq have affected the situation of Syrian refugees, pushing some of them to return to their home country: “25,301 Syrian refugees have returned to Syria in legal and official ways since January 2014, and in the last 30 days, 2,027 refugees crossed the border back to Syria,” Mahmoud said.