Kurdish leaders open to UK migration deal but warn bigger plan needed

Regional officials want development help to take priority over new migration deals to combat trafficking gangs

Migrants are escorted by the Turkish coastguard after being intercepted en route to Greece on the Aegean Sea. Getty Images

The UK's proposed deals with Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Government to tackle criminal gangs smuggling people into Europe has led Turkish and Iraqi-Kurdish officials to warn the schemes could backfire unless it includes wider regional strategies to stop the illegal practice at source.

Bafel Talabani, who leads the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a major party in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, said conversations with the UK government about the issue began a couple of years ago, but he hoped the UK would see this as a “multifaceted problem”.

“We don't see it quite so simply as people in boats, you can stop one line of people in boats but like a hydra, two will spring up in its place,” he told The National. He believes a newly elected Kurdish government – which has yet to be formed – would be “open to” a security co-operation between the two countries to tackle people-smuggling gangs, but added he also hopes to see more foreign investment from UK businesses in the KRG, to help tackle the root causes of migration within the region.

“We’re hoping that things like Brexit will [enable] companies in the UK to invest and work in Kurdistan, which will improve the situation, strengthen the private sector, which is something that's massively lacking,” he said. "We have a young, very well-educated population, and these people don't want to leave. It's the hopelessness that they see that's making them leave," he said.

"If we can embolden the private sector, if we can have more investment, if we can have more infrastructure building projects, then there's no desire for these people to leave their families behind and live as strangers in a strange land."

From the other side of the border there are concerns too about London focusing too narrowly on one facet of the issue. Leaving the burden of resolving the problem solely on countries such as Turkey, while maintaining millions of refugees in the country, would prove unpopular, officials told The National.

Mehmet Ekmen, an MP from south-eastern Turkey, warned that the country's “gate” preventing migrants from entering Europe could soon “explode”. Mr Ekmen said paying Turkey to do more to stop the illegal practice of people smuggling, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of people making their way across Europe before crossing the English Channel in small boats, is unsustainable in the long term.

“Turkey is considered to be a gate or a dam in terms of blocking people who want to leave the Middle East and get to Europe,” he told The National. “Turkey is right now a gateway but if wrong policies are implemented, that gate can explode,” Mr Ekmen said at an event at UK parliament organised by the Centre for Turkey Studies, an organisation based in the UK.

UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is hoping to stop refugees in Turkey, most of whom are Syrian, from setting off on dangerous journeys to the UK, with a new migration deal that resembles that of Italy's far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, The Sunday Times has reported. She said on Friday the UK was working to combat people-smuggling gangs by strengthening international law enforcement.

“The complex network of criminal gangs operating right across Europe” highlighted the “need for international co-operation, both around border security and around action to prevent lives being put at risk, which is what we’re seeing in the Channel,” she told BBC Radio 4. “That’s why we have set up an approach with new border security command, with also a big increase in international co-operation. The work that we are doing with other countries is immensely important.

Her flagship Border Security Command, set up to tackle small boat crossings, recently received an additional £75 million ($97.4 million) of funding, on top of the same figure already committed. Part of the funds will go towards paying for British officers to be deployed in Iraq.

This is part of a series of migration deals seeking to stop small boat crossings, including with the Kurdistan Regional Government and Vietnam. It involves paying those governments to do more to stop people smugglers.

The EU currently pays Turkey billions of pounds a year to host about 3.6 million refugees and Britain has, since 2023, worked to strengthen the Turkish police force to tackle “migration crime”, and speed up intelligence and customs data-sharing between the two countries. However, these existing deals had been unpopular in Turkey and this was reflected in recent elections, Mr Ekmen said.

The far-right populist Sinan Ogan won 5 per cent of the national vote in presidential elections last year. “People are not happy about [the migration deals] in Turkey," Mr Ekmen said. "The biggest criticism of the Turkish government has been its migration policy,” he said.

Any new agreement between the UK and Turkey needed to recalibrate the existing arrangements, he suggested. “Keeping millions of migrants in Turkey cannot be a policy on its own,” added Mr Ekman. “The policy should be European countries and Turkey working together to find the solution that works for everyone in the country."

The UK has identified Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region as a key point of origin for people-smuggling gangs and is in conversation with the newly elected regional government about tackling this problem from the source. Earlier this year, Barzan Majeed, one of Europe’s most notorious people smugglers, was arrested in Iraq.

An adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government agreed that the UK and European countries would be better off investing in overseas development projects to help stop the causes for migration.

“We do not like the Kurdistan region to be a source of problems for everybody,” said Falah Mustafa, an adviser on foreign affairs to the Kurdistan Regional Government. He hopes the international community will help the Kurdistan region of Iraq "to create jobs, open opportunities for scholarships, for entrepreneurial skills", so that people "feel that they have a better future to stay" within the country, he said at foreign affairs think tank Chatham House in London.

The UK’s Labour government recently announced it would stop foreign aid budgets being channelled to the Home Office to pay for the housing of asylum seekers. Mr Mustafa told the The National that overseas investment to deter young Kurds from migrating was “better than spending it back home” on housing for refugees.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer met Ms Meloni in Rome in September to discuss her government’s strategy to reduce the number of migrants reaching Italy by boat. Mr Starmer hailed a “return to British pragmatism” after his talks with Ms Meloni. “I have always made the argument that preventing people leaving their country in the first place is far better than trying to deal with those that have arrived,” he said.

The Italian Interior Ministry has reported a 62 per cent fall in arrivals over the first seven months of 2024, after financial deals were struck with Tunisia and Libya, from where most migrants depart for Europe. Ms Meloni supplied Tunisia with patrol vessels and is equipping Libya’s coastguard.

She also gave Tunisia €100 million ($105 million) in overseas aid to support small companies, and invest in education and renewable energy. This is in addition to similar security arrangements and aid incentives provided to those countries by the EU.