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Iranians in the Kurdistan Region risk lives to fend for their families
[Rudaw] SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region — Khadija’s heart skipped a beat when a friend of her husband told her that her husband, Rizgar, was in hospital. She left her sleeping daughter and rushed to his bedside, but she was too late. In the absence of her loved ones, who were hundreds of miles away, she mourned her husband’s untimely death alone.Like thousands before him, Rizgar Hajizadeh left the Kurdish west of Iran for the Kurdistan Region in search of work, hoping that he’d be able to permanently return home in time to enroll his three-year-old daughter at school. But the 30-year-old died on December 17, 2020, in an explosion at the illegally-established oil refinery he worked at in Duhok. The surge of Iranians across their home country’s western border in search of work followed US sanctions imposed from 2018 onwards that devastated Iran’s economy. Before the coronavirus brought cross-border travel to an end for much of 2020, there were some 35,000 Iranians being paid on a daily basis for their work in the Kurdistan Region, news agency ILNA said, citing “unofficial statistics”. Posted by: badanov 2021-01-27 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=592508 |