Services Iraqis "want" to live in Kurdistan... Cheap housing and security are available

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Economy News - Baghdad
Muhammad Ali (65 years old) is a middle school teacher who was retired at the beginning of the year 2022. He sold his house located in the Al-I’lam neighborhood in the capital, Baghdad, and bought two houses with its price in the city of Sulaymaniyah. He moved to live in one of them with his wife, and offered the other for rent.
He says about his quick move to live in Sulaymaniyah: “We were suffering in Baghdad from continuous power and water cuts, from traffic jams that destroy the human psyche, and from the recurring problem of water drainage due to the deterioration of the sewers. Our area flooded due to the rains and water entered our homes in the winter, and in the summer the heat was unbearable, so I planned to move even before my job ended.”
His three sons and their families, who live in Baghdad, spend their spring and summer breaks at his house, and they would all like to live permanently near him in Sulaymaniyah, says Mohammed Ali, if it weren’t for their government jobs and private businesses.
The desire to settle in the Kurdistan Region, by Iraqi citizens from different regions of Iraq, is not new, as hundreds of thousands have taken the same step as Muhammad Ali since the fall of the former Iraqi regime in 2003, in search of security or to benefit from the public services provided there. They became part of society and contributed to its economic development and cultural diversification, and many of them integrated to the point of learning the Kurdish language, according to the “Nirij Company for Investigative Journalism.”
Official statistics indicate that there are about one million Iraqi citizens of Arab nationality living in the Kurdistan Region, whether those who fled there to escape the violence following the ISIS takeover of a number of areas in the center and west of the country in the summer of 2014 or those who had sought refuge there during the last two decades and settled there for various reasons, including those related to work and trade.
The number of people wishing to reside permanently in Kurdistan increased following the issuance of a decision by the regional government in 2018 allowing non-Kurdish Iraqis to own real estate, whether land or residential homes, and owning them before that required special security approvals.
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According to statistics circulated in the media in 2022, there are 55,000 Arab families in Erbil Governorate, 25,412 families in Sulaymaniyah, and 7,721 families in Dohuk Governorate, while the regional government speaks of the presence of about 665,000 displaced persons living in camps set up for them in the region since 2014.
Social researcher Hiwa Omar attributes the dense presence of Arabs in Erbil to its being the capital of the region and having more job opportunities than the rest of the governorates, in addition to its development in services. He adds, “Also, Erbil is the closest to the three governorates that ISIS entered, which are Nineveh, Salah al-Din, and Kirkuk, so it has become a destination for displaced people from A large part of them preferred to settle in these governorates.”
Iraqi Arabs wishing to reside in the region are subject to legal procedures before they are granted a three-month renewable residency, after which it can be converted to a one-year residency if they prove their residence in the region by submitting a lease contract or proof of their ownership of a residential property, while Kurds coming from the provinces are exempt. Other of these procedures.
However, according to lawyer Nada Ibrahim, this residence permit can be withdrawn if: “It is proven that the resident is involved in terrorist acts, has committed a felony, or has a financial lawsuit brought against him that exposes him to imprisonment.”
The Kurdish authorities also allow Arab residents of the region to run for election or participate in voting, provided that their ration cards are issued by one of the region’s governorates, so that they can vote or run for office. They can also transfer their ration cards to the region, but the procedures are very complicated, according to local officials.
The ration card is owned by every Iraqi family, and it was issued in the 1990s after the United Nations imposed economic sanctions on Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait. The state resorted to supporting families with the necessary ration materials, and gave them a special card for that. Over time, it became a document that must be presented to the official departments when Initiate the promotion of several transactions.

Control of the real estate sector

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Muhammad (40 years old), an employee in the Ministry of Health, suffered after his marriage from the rise in real estate prices in the capital, Baghdad, and was unable to own “a single inch of land,” as he put it. The $500 rent for his house also weighed heavily on him, especially after he became a father of twins.
“My wife couldn’t work after giving birth to our two children and my salary was barely enough for us,” he says. “I knew that real estate prices in Erbil were much lower than those in Baghdad, services were better and the security situation was more stable, so in 2022 I decided to buy an apartment and move here.”
Mohammed was able to secure the first payment of $20,000, and paid it to get an apartment in the Lalaf City complex on the outskirts of Erbil, and transferred his assignment to the Health Department in Kirkuk (96 km south of Erbil). He sees no harm in taking the commute every day from his apartment to his workplace, which takes about an hour to go and back.
Pointing to the residential complex in which he lives, he says, “The monthly installment for the apartment I live in is $400, which is less than the price of the rent that I used to pay in Baghdad, and my way to my work place is better than in Baghdad, as the traffic there forced me to leave two hours before work, and here “I now own the apartment I live in.”
He adds with a smile: “Everything has become better. If I had not made the decision to move to Erbil, I would have gone to the slums to get rid of the rent, and I would have remained stuck in the problems of deteriorating services, chaos in the place, and fears of eviction.”
By slums, we mean those houses that are built on state-owned land, on the outskirts of the capital, Baghdad. Their prices are low, and basic services are not available, and their buyers remain in the hope that the state will own it for them, and they are constantly subject to demolition.
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Advertisements for selling real estate in installments in the governorates of the Kurdistan region are widespread on social networking sites, and it is easy to notice that they mostly target Arabs, because many of them are published in Arabic, and at attractive prices that are less than half and sometimes a third of their counterparts in Baghdad.
This is confirmed by Dana Omar, who works in real estate marketing, who says that Arabs “have become a clear part of the components of society in the region,” indicating that some residential complexes with vertical construction are inhabited by an Arab majority, and the segment of retirees and employees who can transfer their jobs to Kirkuk or Mosul or even the provinces of the region tend to live in those complexes.
He added, “Arabs are not limited to buying real estate in installments in modern complexes only. Rather, many of them are moving to buy houses outside the complexes in regular residential neighborhoods, whose prices are usually lower than the prices in the complexes and are suitable for those who sold their house, for example, in Baghdad or Mosul and want to buy a property while keeping the property.” With some money, real estate in general in Kurdistan is cheaper and its services are better.”
Real estate sales and rental offices in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah depend, sometimes by up to 60%, on Arab clients who are looking for stability in the Kurdistan Region. They are a diverse mix of traders, investors, doctors, university professors, retirees, employees in non-governmental organizations, or businessmen and workers in specific fields. 
Real estate prices vary in the Kurdistan region, according to Dana, and this is determined by the location of the property and the area. He explains: “Anyone who has 40 thousand dollars can buy a simple property, and the first batch of apartments in residential complexes does not exceed 20 thousand dollars, and there is a system of installments and payment over years, each year.” “This is not available in the rest of the country.”
In view of the increasing number of Arabs in the Kurdistan region, schools were opened to teach in the Arabic language there, linked to the Ministry of Education in the region. This was before 2014, and after that year, which witnessed the control of ISIS over several Iraqi provinces and the displacement of hundreds of thousands to the Kurdistan region, affiliated schools were opened there. The representative office of the Ministry of Education in the federal government is in Baghdad. There are also private schools and even centers for learning the Arabic language attended by Kurdish citizens.
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Rising prices

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Economic specialists believe that the economic crisis that the Kurdistan region has witnessed in recent years due to disputes between the regional government and the federal government regarding the export of oil produced in Kurdistan and revenues from border crossings, which affected the purchasing power of the Kurdish citizen and in conjunction with the rise in the exchange rate of the dollar against the Iraqi dinar, contributed in turn. In strengthening the Arab presence in Kurdistan.
Kurdish economist Alan Mumtaz explains the relationship between the presence of Arabs in the Kurdistan region and the rise in prices there, saying: “There is no doubt that the increase in demand for real estate caused an increase in their prices if calculated in dinars, but the money that most Arabs spend is produced outside the region and has an economic multiplier.”
In economics, the economic multiplier is the positive effect of spending money in a particular sector on other sectors.
Mamtaz links the decline in the purchasing power of the Kurdish citizen to the problems with Baghdad and the flaws in the economic policy, and he explains his point of view: “Years of mismanagement of the region’s resources, and the economic war between the regional authorities and the federal government, which uses the employees’ strength as a means of pressure, affected the regular payment of salaries in the region, and this was negatively reflected on all sectors and led to the contraction of economic activities in the region.”
With the disruption of salary payments and the decline in Kurdistan, a difference appeared between the purchasing power of the Kurdish citizen compared to the incomes of Arab expatriates who obtain them from outside the region on a consistent basis.
The expert, Mumtaz, condemns what he describes as attempts by some to inflame differences between the components and push the Kurdish citizen in the region to reject the policy of opening the door to Arab immigrants, claiming that they cause an increase in prices. He says: “This is not true, as the presence of Arabs in the region has many economic advantages.”
He believes that the reason for the rise in prices in the region is the monopolistic pressures of the powers controlling the markets in the region, and not the incoming Arab consumer, as he describes it, which makes: “the positive effect of the economic multiplier unbalanced between social classes.”
He continues: “The market monopolists in the region exert pressure on the incomes of the lower social classes and seize most of the economic benefits.”
Hence, Mumtaz confirms that the Kurdish citizen who sees the inflationary effect of the spending of Arab immigrants as greater than the benefits of the economic multiplier is a victim not of the Arab immigrants, but of the market monopolists.”
Kamran Ahmed, professor of economics at the University of Sulaymaniyah, points to another aspect imposed by the increasing stability of Arabs in the Kurdistan Region, which is represented by competition over available job opportunities, especially with their acceptance of lower wages. He says, “The Arab worker accepts a lower wage than the Kurdish worker, and this has increased unemployment rates among the Kurdish workforce, but it has also allowed for services to be provided at lower and more competitive prices.”
To avoid the effects of this, the regional government directed investors in all sectors to have 75% of their employees be Kurds. However, many companies and business owners do not implement these instructions and circumvent them in various ways to achieve greater profits.
Kamran continued, “Simple private sector jobs such as construction and cleaning, in addition to the restaurant sector and sales in the markets, witness more competition than other sectors between Arabs and Kurds due to the abundance of Arab workers after the waves of displacement in 2014.”
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disconnect then connect

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Due to geography, Arabs and Kurds in Iraq have historical ties and are linked by several cultural and economic links. This relationship is explained by the former member of the Kurdistan Parliament, Bakhshan Zanganeh, who says, “At many political turning points, there was a high level of solidarity between the people of the two nationalities, and in general, they are connected by a friendly relationship despite the racist policies of the previous Iraqi regimes against the Kurds, which at some stages reached the level of ethnic cleansing and their adoption of a scorched earth policy, as happened in the chemical bombing and the Anfal operations in the 1980s.”
The Iraqi Kurdistan region, with its current borders, was formed in 1991 with the protection of the international community and the auspices of the United Nations following the uprising of the Kurds there against the Baath Party regime. After that, the relationship between the residents of the region and the Arabs in the rest of Iraq witnessed a rupture that extended for more than two decades, and they remained almost isolated from each other until The fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003.
Zangana explains aspects of that period: “There was a kind of independence and economic, social and cultural separation between the majority of the regions of Kurdistan and the other regions of Iraq, and a Kurdish generation arose that did not use the Arabic language. Its information and observations of the rest of the regions of Iraq were weak and mostly negative as a result of the accumulations of the Baath Party’s rule, and the nationalist spirit was strengthened among the Kurds.”
But the situation changed after 2003 and there was an openness between the two peoples, and the Kurds contributed to forming the new state, drafting its constitution, and protecting its institutions through the Peshmerga forces that were present in Baghdad, Nineveh, and Kirkuk and protected sensitive areas there during the period of sectarian war and the spread of terrorist groups.
Umm Hussein (40 years old) came from Baghdad to Sulaymaniyah with her husband and two children following the sectarian events in 2006. She says: “We were surrounded by death from all sides. We had no choice but to head towards the region to save our lives.”
Thousands of families did so, including the families of senior state officials, fleeing the sectarian violence that erupted between Sunni and Shiite Arabs between the years (2004-2008), preferring to live in security-fortified Kurdistan, where there was no room for them to be targeted by armed groups.
Umm Hussein adds, in a confident tone: “And now, after all these years, that was the best decision we made. There is no room for sectarian and nationalist strife here. We live in complete safety and far from many events that occurred that might have claimed our lives.”
Even with the return of security to various Iraqi regions, the woman rejects the idea of ​​returning again: “I will not return. My family and I have become part of this community. My husband owns a clothing store and my children are now at university studying engineering and programming. They grew up with their Kurdish peers and speak Kurdish fluently.”
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Rejecters and supporters

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The continued influx of Arabs into the Kurdistan Region is worrying some Kurds, such as the young Makwan Muhammad (20 years old), who works selling fruits and vegetables near the Qala’a market in Erbil. He expresses his fear that the region will turn into an Arab region in a few years.
He says, “Kurdistan will lose its identity, as Arabs fill the markets and residential neighborhoods. It is true that tourism depends on them primarily, and they stimulate the markets in general, but their move to live here has increased the economic costs on us, and they have begun to compete with us for the already scarce job opportunities.”
He added in broken Arabic, pointing to the shops, “There is hardly a shop here that does not have Arab workers. They compete with the people of the city for work, and we are all forced to learn Arabic and speak it on many occasions because many of the customers are Arabs.”
Many like Makwan, due to the rules imposed by the market, were forced to learn Arabic after knowing nothing about it years ago. Most shops, companies, restaurants, hospitals and medical clinics also hang Arabic signs in their windows to attract customers.
Unlike Makwan, Sherko Mustafa (50 years old), who works in the Qalaa market, sees their presence as an opportunity to restore communication between Kurds and Arabs and “overcome the fanaticism that is spreading among Kurdish youth as a result of previous wrong policies with nationalist tendencies,” as he put it.
The former representative of Bakhshan agrees with him, and says, “The chauvinist practices of seizing Kurdish lands in areas that the constitution calls disputed, and discrimination against the Kurdish population led to the creation of a hostile spirit on both sides at the popular level in some areas, especially in Kirkuk.”
This is what Salah Ali, a Kurdish lawyer who has many Arab clients, insists on overcoming. He says, “These policies must stop, and everything that serves positive coexistence between the various components in all Iraqi cities must be done, by addressing the problems that raise sensitivities.”
The fears of some Kurdish citizens about the increasing numbers of Arabs in the Kurdistan Region and the existence of sensitivities due to the failure to resolve controversial files between the two governments, do not change the general Kurdish atmosphere that is understanding and welcoming of the choice of many Iraqi Arabs of the Kurdistan Region as a place of settlement for their lives, which is reflected in their feeling of reassurance, comfort and satisfaction.
There are several cultural and social reasons cited by civil activist Hussein al-Janabi for the Arabs’ move towards the region and settling there. “Here the civil character dominates life, the law imposes itself, there is a wider space for freedoms, and armed groups do not exist, so the region has become more like a safe haven for many activists.” And journalists and politicians.”
Al-Janabi recalls what happened during the October 2019 protests that erupted in central and southern Iraq against corruption and mismanagement by the country’s ruling elite: “The demonstrators faced killing and activists were pursued by armed groups. They and their families did not find a safe place to preserve their lives in the provinces of the region.”[/size]

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Added 06/30/2024 - 10:00 AM
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