Acting governor of Kirkuk Rakan Saeed al-Jiburi unveiled a plan to return all displaced people housed in Kirkuk IDP camps their places of origin, copying a similar move carried out by the local administration in Ninewa.
Hundreds of displaced families which settled in southern Mosul camps after fleeing the Islamic State (IS) attacks in mid-2014 were sent back in late September to their areas of origin.
Earlier, the Iraqi ministry of migration and displacement announced the shutdown of the Jada’a-6 IDP Camp located in southern Mosul’s Gayyara district after the camp residents returned their home areas in the provinces of Salahaddin and Anbar.
“The Kirkuk local administration has set a plan before the recent protests which broke out in Iraq to return 500 displaced families to their homes Tikrit (provincial capital of Salahaddin),” Rakan al-Jiburi told KirkukNow.
The acting governor noted that local administration in Salahaddin practiced the same plan after it sent back Kirkuk families to their home areas.
The displaced families currently settled in Kirkuk are divided into three groups. The first one includes residents of the same province, particularly from Hawija district to the southwest. The majority of these have returned home.
The second group includes IDPs from the neighboring provinces of Ninewa, Salahaddin and Diyala, who arrived after the start of the military operations against IS, while the third group is made up of residents of over 116 Kirkuk villages, their numbers estimated to be around 70 thousand people. These villages were destroyed during the fighting against IS.
