RIYADH: A total of 106 Iraqi refugees living in Rafha camp for the past 18 years are still struggling to find a third country for asylum, Firas Kayal, external relations officer at the UNHRC Regional Office here, said.
Asylum cases of the Iraqis, who fled Iraq and came to Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War, are yet to be considered by other countries.
“The UNHCR, however, is very grateful to the Saudi government, which has been extremely generous in providing food, shelter and medicine besides other basic amenities of life to about 35,000 original Iraqi refugees, who fled to Saudi Arabia at that time,” said Kayal, speaking after the release of a UNHCR report concerning refugees on Thursday. The report, first released in Geneva, provides a statistical overview of asylum applications filed in 38 European and six non-European countries.
The UN refugee agency report shows that the number of Iraqis seeking asylum in industrialized countries dropped in the first six months of 2008, but they were still by far the top destinations of refugees seeking asylum. According to the report, the number of claims made by Iraqis (19,500) during the first six months of 2008, was higher than the combined number of asylum petitions submitted by citizens of the Russian Federation (9,400) and China (8,700), the second and third most important source countries.
