INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Shafaq News/ Eight hundred Iraqi refugees returned home from northeast Syria on Thursday and hundreds more are to follow, a Syrian official
in the region’s Kurdish semi-autonomous administration said.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the first group left on buses via
the Al-Yarubiyah border crossing.The Iraqi government has “agreed to the return of (a total of) 800 families,” the Syrian Kurdish source
told AFP, adding that many of them had sought refuge in Syria after the Daesh group expanded its presence in Iraq.They had been living in
villages bordering Iraq, under the control of the Kurdish-led forces that rule regions of north and northeast Syria.A senior Iraqi security
source said: “We have been checking their identities for security reasons for the past year.“They’ve been suffering from the difficult
economic conditions in Syria.”Relatives of jihadists, including children, are held in Kurdish-controlled camps in Syria’s northeast, the
largest of which is Al-Hol, with around 56,000 displaced people and refugees.Since last year, Iraqi authorities have repatriated hundreds of
Iraqi families from Al-Hol.The Daesh group ruled large swathes of Iraq between 2014 and 2017.Kurdish-led forces backed by the United States
seized the group’s last territorial bastion in Syria in 2019.Source: AFP
