Anti-deportation campaigners are staging a demonstration on Thursday outside the London office of the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government to highlight its complicity in the mass deportations of Iraqi-Kurdish refugees.

The protest, called by the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees (IFIR) and supported by London No Borders, the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns, Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! and the SOAS Detainee Support Group, will coincide with an international demonstration called by IFIR outside the UN offices in Geneva. No Borders South Wales is also holding a solidarity demonstration at the UK Border Agency office in Cardiff.

Since the US-UK-led invasion over six years ago, killings, bombings, abductions, severe poverty, mass unemployment and lack of basic services have become part of everyday life in Iraq. Even in the Kurdistan region, which the Home Office claims to be 'safer' than other parts of the country, people are fleeing the region everyday for fear of death and persecution.

Iraqis remain the highest percentage of all nationalities seeking refuge in neighbouring countries as well as in Europe and northern America. Thousands more have resorted to begging, prostitution or selling their internal organs to avoid destitution.

Badran Bewari, an Iraqi-Kurdish refugee who will be present at the demonstration, said:
"The Kurdistan Regional Government, which is trading Kurdish refugees for financial gains, is complicit in these tragedies and should stop 'cooperating' with European governments against its own people."

Abbas, who was deported two months ago, said:
"I don't know when I'll see my partner or my daughter again. I speak to them in tears on the phone every night. I am still in shock after being sent back. I have had to change my name so I'm not targeted by the same people who threatened to kill me before. My entire world has caved in. The people who are still in the UK should take a stand against the policy of both their government and the KRG."

Yet, European countries such as the UK, Germany and Sweden are locking up Iraqi refugees in detention centres and forcibly deporting them back to the country they had fled. Over 400 hundreds Iraqi-Kurdish refugees have been forcibly deported from the UK via charter flights over the last eight months.

Many of those deported had fled the KRG authorities, to whose mercy they are being sent back. Earlier this week, a report by Amnesty International revealed "a pattern of abuses" committed by KRG security forces. A 2007 report by Human Rights Watch similarly revealed that KRG security forces "routinely torture and deny basic due-process rights to detainees."

Separated from their friends and families, deportees are arrested, handcuffed and put on special charter flights that carry them to northern Iraq, where they are received by KRG security forces. Many of them have since committed suicide, been kidnapped or killed in car bombs. Others have gone into hiding or changed their names to avoid persecution.

Dashty Jamal, Secretary of IFIR, said:
"The Iraqi and Kurdistan governments have failed to provide security and safety for their citizens, which has led to hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the country. Yet, they make such shameful deals with European governments and trade in people's lives and futures."

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Notes to editors:

1- The KRG office in London is located at Winchester House, 8th Floor, 259-269 Old Marylebone Road, NW1 5RA.

2- The IFIR is calling upon the UN to demand "an immediate end" to the policy of forced deportation of Iraqi-Kurdish refugees by all European countries, release all Iraqi refugees from prisons and detention centres and "treat them with compassion". See the full call-out at http://www.federationifir.com/english-folder/index.html.

3- The first mass deportation of Iraqi Kurds from the UK took place on 19 November, 2005. 15 men were then taken to an undisclosed airport at night, handcuffed, beaten and forced onto a military plane headed for Erbil via Cyprus. The 'operation' sparked a lot of anger and protest and deportations to Iraqi Kurdistan were halted for a while until they were resumed in September 2006. Deportation charter flights to Iraqi Kurdistan have since become more frequent. There have been 8 such flights in the last 8 months, with over 400 deported. The code name given by immigration authorities to Iraqi Kurdistan deportation charter flights is 'Operation Consimilar'.

5- Iraqi refugees are also deported individually or in twos on Royal Jordanian Airlines commercial flights. Eight people are scheduled to be deported with Royal Jordanian next week.

6- There are signs that the Home Office might start deporting people to the rest of Iraq as well, not only Kurdistan. Last month, Sweden and Iraq signed a deal that will make it easier for Swedish authorities to deport Iraqi asylum seekers to Baghdad, "by force if necessary." The deportation agreement was signed in Baghdad by Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari and Swedish ambassador Niclas Trouve. It is quite likely that the UK could follow suit in the near future.

7- Ironically, a German programme to resettle 2,500 vulnerable Iraqi refugees got under way last month, with the first 122 flown from Syria to northern Germany on 19th March. The UNHCR estimates that more than 60,000 Iraqi refugees need resettlement from Iraq's neighbouring countries. Last year 17,770 Iraqi refugees were resettled to third countries, mostly in the west. See http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/iraq?page=news&id=49c273aa2.

8- According to statistics compiled by the UNHCR based on information provided by governments, some 338,000 new applications for refugee status were submitted in 2007 in 43 industrialised countries, a 10 percent rise compared to 2006. For the second year running, Iraqis topped the list of asylum seekers in the world's industrialised countries. This represented only 1 percent of the estimated 4.5 million Iraqis uprooted by the war. It is estimated that some two million Iraqis have sought refuge in neighbouring countries, mainly in Syria and Jordan. See http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/iraq?page=press&id=47de99982.

9- The Amnesty International report, 'Hope and Fear', is available at http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=18152. The Human Rights Watch report, 'Caught in the Whirlwind', is available at http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2007/07/02/caught-whirlwind-0.