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In the streets and cafes of both Erbil and the Iraqi capital Baghdad, heated conversations have shifted in recent days from a focus on Gaza and Lebanon to Syria, following the collapse of the 50-year Assad rule in a rapid offensive led by the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), aggravating concerns about notoriously porous borders across the region.

The recent regional upsets may lead to more displacement in Gaza – both internal and external – or more people previously displaced returning to their homes, as we are witnessing with Syrians. 

In either case, as local officials in Iraq have repeatedly pointed out, smuggling continues even from parts of the Middle East that enjoy relative stability.

Multiple arrests of Iraqi Kurds in particular seem to have spurred more attention to this part of Iraq that has long been seen as being close to Western nations.

A joint plan signed late last month by the UK and Iraq to crack down on smuggling gangs has come amid pressure to halt irregular immigration across both Europe and the Middle East and seems focused to a significant extent on the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI).

Numerous smuggling gangs busted in recent years in the UK and other locations across Europe were run by individuals of Kurdish ethnicity. The first such bust after the accord came on 4 December, when German police targeted an Iraqi-Kurdish alleged criminal network accused of smuggling migrants from France to the UK.

The raids began before dawn with over 500 officers taking part in an operation coordinated with Europol and French security services and came after a joint Belgian-French-German investigation earlier this year into another Iraqi-Kurdish smuggling network that led to 19 arrests.

‘World-first’ accord inked after sharp rise in migrants

The November agreement was announced during a high-profile three-day visit to Iraq and Erbil by UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and hailed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer in a 28 November speech as a “world-first” accord of its kind that “will help us smash the people-smuggling gangs” and “secure our borders”.

In his November speech, Starmer noted that “nearly one million people came to Britain in the year ending June 2023”, and that this was four times the level of migration seen in 2019.

The UK-Iraq agreement signed in November will involve the UK disbursing £300,000 for border security training for Iraqi law enforcement. The training will focus on organised crime in relation to immigration as well as drug trafficking.

Notably, the UK will give almost as much £200,000 to the authorities in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) — which has a population of just over six million people according to the census conducted last month — to step up border control.

The entire region has approximately the same number of inhabitants as those living in the city of Baghdad alone, compared with Iraq’s total population of about 46 million.

However, the KRI shares key border points with Turkey, Iran, and Syria.

Iraq and the UK stated that they would “enhance their cooperation” to send Iraqi nationals whose asylum requests were rejected more “swiftly”.

In commenting on how the two countries would “go after these criminal gangs”, Cooper said that the latter had been “operating out of the Kurdistan Region in Iraq and having that law enforcement cooperation across borders is crucial to going after gangs who operate across borders”.

Critic of accord cites record of violating human rights

Lily Hamourtziadou, a senior lecturer in the UK on International Relations and Security and principal researcher for the Iraq Body Count NGO, which has been documenting civilian deaths in Iraq since 2003, commented to ������ on the Iraq-UK accord by noting that “on the one hand, this is a good development”, in terms of intelligence sharing about human trafficking, since “we know that people sometimes die as a result of this” illegal activity.

“However, let’s just look at the context of the UK and Iraq” and “why people are leaving Iraq. Why people would be willing to pay these gangs and put their lives at risk to flee Iraq,” she stressed.

“These questions need to be asked. A lot of the answers are found in the types of government Iraq has had since 2006. Every government since 2006 has violated human rights,” she claimed, noting that successive Iraqi governments have allegedly been involved in the killing of protesters and executing prisoners, “sometimes without notifying even families.”

Instability, economic woes, or PKK problems?

On 18 November 2021, the Iraqi government’s first repatriation flight from Belarus for over four hundred of its nationals who had tried and failed to enter Europe – and had been as a result stranded on the border as freezing winter temperatures set in – was packed primarily with residents of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI).

EU Council President Charles Michel claimed at the time that Belarus was “weaponising migrants’ distress cynically and shockingly” as part of a “brutal hybrid attack” on EU borders.

At that time, Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) spokesman Jotiar Adil claimed at a press conference that the main driver for such a large number leaving was not primarily a financial one, as those leaving had somehow found several thousand dollars for the trip and that they had “financial possibilities” that many others did not.

He added that the continuing presence of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the instability resulting from the latter also contributed to so many people leaving the region. 

The group may also, however, be a reason some of these people can do so who otherwise would not be able to. One of the young men this correspondent spoke to at the time at the airport the night of the first repatriation flight in 2021 said that he had paid $3,800 for the journey to Belarus.

The 18-year-old, originally from Suleymaniyah in the southeastern part of the KRI, told her that he had previously travelled both to Turkey and Iran but “couldn’t say” then where he got the money from, as he was not officially employed nor did he get the money from relatives.

The PKK is considered a terrorist organisation by the US, the EU, and Turkey. In July, Iraq officially ordered it to be referred to as “banned” in all communication regarding the group. The next month, the Supreme Judicial Council banned all activities of three Iraqi political parties due to PKK links.

The PKK has historically used drug dealing and smuggling to fund its activities. As a 2009 published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy noted, “The PKK has long engaged in criminal activities such as trafficking of counterfeit money, illegal foreign currency exchanges, smuggling, tax evasion, and drug dealing. As a result of the PKK's increasing activity in the international narcotics trade, the Treasury Department designated the group a significant foreign narcotics trafficker in May 2008.”

A online in 2021 stated: “The majority of the PKK’s proceeds are widely attributed to drug crime. Turkish estimates in 2016, published for the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), estimated their annual drug trafficking revenue at 1.5 billion USD. The report also alleged that the PKK controlled 80 percent of Europe’s drugs market.”

It added that: “Serial PKK extortion was concentrated almost on one prominent street in North London, namely Green Lanes in Haringey, which boasts a number of Turkish and Kurdish businesses and restaurants — indicating a clustered pool of exploitable targets for extortion and other financing activities.”

On 27 November, British police said that they had arrested six individuals and were searching eight addresses including a Kurdish community centre in North London as part of a counterterrorism investigation into activities suspected to be linked to the PKK.

Acting Commander Helen Flanagan from the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command commented by saying, “I hope that these arrests show that we will not tolerate any sort of terrorist activity and that we will take action where we believe there is harm being caused to communities here in the UK or elsewhere.”

Aiming at drug trafficking networks

“When it comes to drugs, there has been an uptick not only in the trafficking of drugs like Captagon and crystal methamphetamine into the north [of Iraq] but flagged production sites as well,” Director of the Strategic Blind Spots Portfolio at the New Lines Institute Caroline Rose told ������ on 4 December in response to questions on the UK-Iraq accord.

“Our comprehensive seizure database at the New Lines Institute’s Captagon Trade Project revealed that there were two lab seizures in Sulaymaniyah and one in Aawbar Village — a huge development as it’s been very rare to see signs of manufacturing in Iraq before 2023, let alone in” the KRI, she added.

Sulaymaniyah is located closer to the Iranian border than Erbil and is dominated by a political faction with closer links to the central government and Iran.

The political faction has and facilitating their activities including involvement in the drug trade.

More in general, Rose added, “I think that this deal will be a stepping stone for the UK to exchange the intelligence it’s compiled on its own as well as tip-offs it has received regarding some of these national and transnational criminal organizations operating in the IKR [KRI] and Iraq more broadly.

"It appears that one of the greatest areas of focus will be cross-border security, as the UK and its partners have been concerned about corruption, illicit taxation, and weakness against forces like the PMF [Popular Mobilization Forces] at key border checkpoints.”

The PMF are part of the Iraqi central government’s official armed forces. Some PMF brigades are linked to armed groups operating outside government control, including ones that have historically received training and funding from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

In the predominantly Yazidi city of Sinjar in northwestern Iraq near the Syrian border, some parts of the PMF have been accused of ties with the PKK.

Yazidis originally from Sinjar but who remain displaced in the Kurdistan Region often cite both the lack of services in Sinjar as well as continuing instability due to the presence of armed groups as a reason for not wanting to return.

Many also say they are trying to find a way to get to Europe.

Shelly Kittleson is a journalist specialising in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Her work has been published in several international, US and Italian media outlets

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