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Iranian Kurd refugees refusing aid on
Iraq-Jordan border
11.7.2006
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GENEVA, July 11,
(AFP) - Some 200 Iranian Kurds who fled
violence-plagued Iraq and are now stuck in dire
conditions along the Jordanian border are refusing
UN aid, and three of them have gone on hunger
strike, the UN refugee agency has said.
The refugees, stuck in a no-man's land between the
two countries for the past 18 months, are demanding
they be allowed to enter Jordan and then be
resettled in a third country, said William Spindler,
spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR).
"Most of them want to go to the United States," he
said.
But he said the UNHCR did not have the authority to
force Jordan to open its border to them.
The UNHCR is encouraging them to enter a refugee
camp in Kawa, in Iraqi Kurdistan, in an area that
already houses about 10,000 Iranian Kurds who are
registered with the UN agency.
The UNHCR, which has offered assistance to the Kurds
on Jordanian border, is "increasingly concerned,"
Spindler said.
"While UNHCR has done all in its power to send
assistance and medical care, the refugees have
consistently refused any of this help, putting the
lives of the most vulnerable among them in serious
danger," Spindler said.
He said three of them have gone on hunger strike in
the past two weeks and their health has severely
deteriorated.
The Iranian Kurds, who had fled the 1979 Islamic
revolution, were until early 2005 living in a
refugee camp in central Iraq, but they were forced
to flee due to the insurgency there.
Jordan, already home to 1.7 million Palestinian
refugees, has repeatedly refused to accept more
refugees for demographic and economic reasons.
AFP
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