The purpose of this report is to provide relevant information for the assessment of applications for international protection, including refugee status and subsidiary protection, and in particular for use in updating EUAA’s country guidance document on Iraq.
The report covers the period February 2023 – March 2024, and provides an update of the EUAA COI report: Iraq - Security situation (January 2022). The report should be read in conjunction with the EUAA COI report: Iraq - Country Focus (May 2024).
The report is divided into two chapters. The first chapter focuses on the general security situation in Iraq by providing a general background of recent conflicts in the country, the current political situation, and information on the main armed actors in Iraq and Kurdistan Region of Iraq and their territorial presence and role. It is followed by a general overview of the current security situation in the reference period, as it relates to the nature of the violence and impact on civilians.
The second chapter provides a governorate-level description of the security situation. Each governorate chapter includes a brief description of the governorate, actors involved in the conflict, recent security trends, including information on civilian casualties, civilian infrastructure impacted and the existence of unexploded ordnances UXO and Explosive Remnants of War ERW, as well as information on displacement and return.
For organisational purposes only, the governorates are clustered in geographic order and are grouped as follows:
• the northwestern and central governorates (Anbar, Babil, Baghdad, Diyala, Kirkuk, Ninewa, Salah al-Din);
• Kurdistan Region of Iraq (Dohuk, Erbil and Sulaymaniyah);
• the southern governorates (Basrah, Karbala, Missan, Muthanna, Najaf, Qadissiya, Thi-Qar and Wassit).
This report was jointly drafted by the EUAA COI Sector together with the Austrian Centre for Country of Origin and Asylum Research and Documentation (ACCORD).
The following departments and organisations reviewed this report:
• Czech Republic, Department for Asylum and Migration Policy
• Greece, Greek Asylum Service (GAS), General Secretariat for Migration Policy
• Sweden, Swedish Migration Agency, Section for Information Analysis
The drafting of this report was finalised on 15 May 2024. Any event taking place after this date is not included in this report.
This report was written according to the EUAA COI Report Methodology (2023) and to the EUAA COI Writing and Referencing Style Guide (2023).
Politique de traitement
Depuis 2013, la situation sécuritaire dans la région a été largement déterminée par la montée de l'État islamique en Irak et en Syrie (EI) et par la lutte contre celui-ci. Le 9 décembre 2017, le premier ministre alors en fonction, M. al-Abadi, a annoncé que la dernière partie de la zone occupée par l'EI en territoire irakien avait été reprise, mettant ainsi fin à la guerre terrestre contre l'organisation terroriste. La victoire sur l’EI et la reconquête des zones occupées par l’organisation ont manifestement eu un impact positif et tangible sur les conditions de sécurité en Irak. Toutefois, les cellules de l’EI restent actives dans plusieurs provinces et les forces de sécurité irakiennes, les milices chiites et les peshmergas kurdes mènent toujours des opérations contre l’organisation. Cela se traduit par un niveau de violences, une échelle de la violence aveugle et un impact du conflit sur la population qui varient fortement d’une région à l’autre. Par ailleurs, dans le cadre du conflit avec le PKK, l’armée turque procède à des attaques aériennes et mène des opérations terrestres contre des cibles liées au PKK dans les zones frontalières du nord de l’Irak.