BAGHDAD: For years, Rajib Sheikh wired money to his native Bangladesh from his day job in Iraq. But now, stuck without wages, he’s asking his family back home for help.
The 26-year-old patisserie chef has gone three months without wages, and his Iraqi employer just stopped paying for his food stipend, too.
He is one of thousands of foreign migrant workers now stranded in Iraq with no income or way to get back home, watching the economy around them collapse.
“We’re used to sending money back to our country, but now I had to ask my cousin to transfer me money,” said Sheikh, who arrived in the southern oil-rich Basra province seven years ago.
“We hope we can go back to our jobs because it’s not just us who are starving, but our families back home, too,” he said.
The world economy has seen a dramatic slowdown due to the spread of COVID-19, but Iraq — OPEC’s second-largest crude producer — was also hit hard by a collapse in oil prices.
That has sent the country spiralling into its worst fiscal crisis in years, with the World Bank estimating GDP will shrink by 10 percent this year.
Informal workers, it noted, were at a higher risk of falling into “deep poverty” due to the lockdown measures enforced to halt the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Nafis Abbas, a 32-year-old Pakistani tailor in Baghdad, returned to work last week after nearly four months of total shutdown.
“I want to go back (home) but I don’t have any money. If I want to go to Pakistan now, it costs $700 and I don’t have anything — not even 1,000 Iraqi dinars,” equivalent to less than a dollar, he told AFP.
Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers, largely from South Asian countries, have flocked to Iraq over the last decade to work in a range of businesses, from oil fields to restaurants.
Among them are 250,000 registered Bangladeshi workers, according to Mohammed Rezaul Kabir of the country’s embassy in Baghdad.
“More than 20,000 have lost their jobs,” he told AFP, adding that the numbers could be even higher, given how many work informally.
They include 9,000 Bangladeshi laborers at international oil companies and contractors in Basra, once seen as lucky for working in such a lucrative industry.
“Oil prices going down led to a lot of oil fields laying off employees, some of them without even a final paycheck,” said Kabir.
Many Bangladeshi oil workers headed north to Baghdad, hoping their embassy could send them home.
“We are making lists and contacting people as soon as we find a place for them. We are trying our best to transfer them back home but it is expensive and we need a lot of flights to get them there,” said Kabir.
According to an International Labour Organization (ILO) survey, 95 percent of businesses in Iraq have suspended work due to COVID-19.
Four out of 10 said they had to lay off some workers, and many expected the crisis to continue another four months.
Salem Ahmed, an Iraqi restaurateur who employs Bangladeshi, Egyptian and Iraqi workers, said his establishment had been hit hard by the lockdown.
“We estimate our losses at about $20,000 per month,” he said.
“The government didn’t provide any support to businesses, and we’re still expected to pay taxes by July,” he said.
Even once the lockdown is fully lifted, many business owners surveyed by the ILO predicted they would be unable to bring their operations or sales back to pre-coronavirus levels.
Forty percent feared their businesses will shut either temporarily or permanently.
“The government should explore all options to finance measures that support enterprises, and it should provide emergency support to all workers, mainly those who are working informally,” said Maha Kattaa, ILO’s Iraq country coordinator.
But Mohammed Fadel Lhak, a 49-year-old Bangladeshi worker, wasn’t optimistic.
Lhak was in a precarious situation well before the pandemic and the plunge in oil prices, living hand-to-mouth every month from menial jobs at small businesses in Baghdad.
Last year, he always managed to sort something out — but this year feels different.
“Everything is closed now. With the coronavirus, there are no more customers. We just hope for things to get better so we can move on with our lives,” Lhak said.
Migrant workers stuck in virus-hit Iraq with no wages or way home
https://arab.news/jcc9y
Migrant workers stuck in virus-hit Iraq with no wages or way home
- The world economy has seen a dramatic slowdown due to the spread of COVID-19
- Informal workers were at a higher risk of falling into “deep poverty” due to the lockdown measures enforced to halt the spread of the novel coronavirus
As Iran conflict spills over, Iraq’s Kurds say ‘this war is not mine’
- The Kurds, an ethnic minority with a distinct culture and language, are rooted in the mountainous region spread across Turkiye, Syria, Iraq and Iran
- “This isn’t my war,” said 58-year-old Satar Barsirini
SORAN, Iraq: On a deserted road not too far from the border between Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan, Satar Barsirini looked up at the sky, now streaked with jets and drones.
Iraq’s Kurdish region has found itself caught in the crossfire of a regional war triggered by US and Israeli attacks on the Islamic republic.
Dressed like the Kurdish fighters he once served alongside, Barsirini still wears the khaki shalwar, fitted jacket and scarf wrapped around his waist.
Though recently retired, he refuses to give up his peshmerga uniform as he tills his small plot of land.
The rumble of jets and hum of drones “come from everywhere. Especially at night,” he told AFP in the hamlet of Barsirini, dozens of kilometers from the border.
He described the “shiver in our flesh” as the drones hit the ground outside.
“I feel bad for the people, because we have paid a lot in blood to liberate Kurdistan... We just want to live.”
Irbil, the autonomous region’s capital, and the valleys leading to the border have been targeted by Tehran and the Iraqi armed groups it supports.
American bases there have come under fire, as have positions held by Iranian Kurdish parties — the same ones US President Donald Trump said it would be “wonderful” to see storm Iran.
But Iran warned on Friday it would target facilities in Iraqi Kurdistan if fighters crossed into its territory.
“This isn’t my war,” said 58-year-old Barsirini.
He recalled the brutal repression and flight into the snowy mountains after the 1991 Kurdish uprising that followed the first Gulf War.
- ‘Dangerous people’ -
The uprising was repressed, leading to an exodus of two million Kurds to Iran and Turkiye.
“When we fled the cities for our lives, we went to Iran. They helped us, they gave us shelter and food,” he said.
The Kurds would not forget that, Barsirini stressed, adding that they could not just “turn against them” now to support the US and Israel.
“I don’t trust (Americans). They are dangerous people,” he said.
The Kurds, an ethnic minority with a distinct culture and language, are rooted in the mountainous region spread across Turkiye, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
They have long fought for their own homeland, but for decades suffered defeats on the battlefield and massacres in their hometowns.
They make up one of Iran’s most important non-Persian ethnic minority groups.
A week of war has gripped daily life in Iraqi Kurdistan, residents told AFP.
“People are afraid,” said Nasr Al-Din, a 42-year-old policeman who, as a child, lived through the 1991 exodus — “thrown on a donkey’s back with my sister.”
“This generation is different from the older ones” that have seen “seen fighting.”
Now, he said, you could be “sitting down in your home... and all of a sudden a drone hits your house.”
“We may have to go into town or somewhere safer,” said Issa Diayri, 31, a truck driver waiting in a roadside garage, his lorry idle for lack of deliveries from Iran.
- ‘Shouldn’t get involved’ -
Soran, a small town of 3,000 people about 65 kilometers (40 miles) from the border, was hit Thursday by a drone that fell in the middle of a street.
There, baker Yussef Ramazan, 42, and his three apprentices, hurriedly made bread before breaking their fast.
But, living so close to the Iranian border, he said “people are afraid to come and buy it.”
He told AFP he did not think it was a good idea “for the Kurdish region to get involved in this war.”
“We are not even an independent country yet. We would like to become one, but we are nothing for now, so we shouldn’t get involved in these situations.”
Across the street, Hajji watched from his empty dry cleaning shop as the road cleared.
Before the war, the town was crowded as evening fell, he said, declining to give his full name.
“But after the drone explosion, no one was here. In five minutes, everyone left the street and no one was out.”
