1. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
WHY A PROFILING STUDY?
A crisis context
The Sulaymaniyah Governorate, with a total host population of 2.08 million people as well as 260,000 displaced people (IDPs and refugees aggregated), lies at the eastern side of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, bordering with Iran. The southern part of the governorate comprises the Garmian Administration (the districts of Kalar and Kifri). Since 2012, Sulaymaniyah has gradually received Syrian refugees that were moving from their displacement in the Duhok and Erbil Governorates. Since 2003, families displaced from the neighbouring central governorates of Kirkuk, Salahaddin, and Diyala have also sought shelter in Sulaymaniyah’s districts.
While the host community and the local authorities have endured the impact of displacement in the first years, the deterioration if security in the rest of Iraq and the pervasive financial crisis affecting the public and private sectors of the economy are placing the governorate under enormous strain.
Budget disputes between the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Iraq’s Federal Government led to the KRG receiving irregular and intermittent funds from Baghdad for the last 3 years.
In addition, due to a lack of an adequate taxation system in the Kurdistan Region to fund the public budget, the Kurdistan Regional Government has been almost completely dependent on its own oil exports to cover costs. These revenues, however, have diminished drastically after international oil prices dropped by around 70%, starting mid-2014, which has limited and paralysed any further development of public service provision, mainly education and health care.
Taken together, conflict, displacement, and a weak economy are negatively impacting government functions, household resilience, private sector survival, and public service provision in the Sulaymaniyah Governorate and in the whole Kurdistan Region of Iraq in general.
Solutions to redress the situation must stem from a holistic analysis. This profiling exercise takes place within a complex environment, affected by many layers of external and internal shocks.
It is therefore crucial to complement the significant amount of information available on the families sheltered in camps for refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) with a new and comparable analysis of those residing out of camps, in urban areas. It is also relevant to include a review of the needs of the host community living alongside these populations, so that the strategies to mitigate the effects of displacement can benefit all.
For these reasons, the profiling exercise has been conducted; it aims to address the need for an in-depth analysis of the urban displacement situation for both displaced and host populations in the Sulaymaniyah Governorate.
Similar studies have been completed for the Kurdistan Region’s Erbil Governorate (June 2016) and Duhok Governorate (August 2016).