When popular protests erupted in Syria, a mass influx to the Kurdistan region of Iraq began, particularly from the Kurdish majority areas in Syria. The flow of people reached numbers that exceeded the expectation of the Kurdish administration, which started to look for ways to provide refugees with shelter and assistance.
Since March 15, 2011, Syria has experienced popular protests that started with demands for democratic reform, and ended with demands to bring down Bashar al-Assad’s regime. These protests were met with bloody violence by the Syrian security forces and “thugs,” which has resulted in the death of more than 70,000 people, according to the United Nations High Commisioner for Human Rights. Moreover, tens of thousands of protesters are currently being detained in Syrian prisons, according to the SOHR. While there are hundreds of thousands of refugees, displaced and missing persons, the Syrian authorities accuse terrorist groups of being behind the violence.