ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The United Kingdom is collaborating with the Kurdistan Region to combat “organised immigration crime” as Kurdish groups have come to dominate deadly smuggling routes into Britain, a British official told Rudaw. “We maintain a positive relationship with law enforcement partners in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and work with them against a range of shared threats, including organised immigration crime," a spokesperson for the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) press office told Rudaw via email on Wednesday. Kurdish criminal groups control the increasingly lucrative cross-Channel migration routes, according to the NCA, which said in its 2023 assessment that the groups are mainly based in northern Europe. Last Tuesday, a French court sentenced 18 people, mostly Kurds from the Kurdistan Region, to prison terms of up to 15 years for operating a smuggling network that transported people across the English Channel. In May, Kurdish police in Sulaimani arrested a Kurdish man accused of heading an organized crime group that smuggled people into the UK. The NCA spokesperson said that in addition to working with Kurdish law enforcement, they also “target and disrupt organised crime groups at every step of the route, in source countries, in transit countries such as Greece, Italy and Turkey, near the UK border in France and Belgium, and those operating inside the UK itself.” The spokesperson added that they have “around 70 ongoing investigations into networks or individuals in the top tier of organised immigration crime or human trafficking, those inflicting the highest harm, and who are the most difficult to reach. Some of these sit right at the top of the NCA’s priority list.” Every year, tens of thousands of people from Iraq and the Kurdistan Region seek to escape endless crises of lack of employment, political instability, and corruption by joining thousands of others from scores of countries taking perilous routes to Europe. The UK is a popular destination for many people, but crossing the English Channel is dangerous and can be deadly. Feryal Clark, a British Labour MP, told Rudaw in July that the UK needs better policies to deal with immigration. “The bottom of the English Channel and the seas are littered with the hopes and dreams of immigrants, people who have taken the horrible, horrible journey. It is unacceptable. We need a fairer, better way of dealing with immigration. We need to have legal routes, as we had for Ukraine, as we had for Afghanistan, where people can apply in the country where they’re in, and travel without having to take this perilous journey,” she said. Around 20,000 people from Iraq and the Kurdistan Region migrated out of the country in 2023, with at least nine of them losing their lives on the dangerous and illegal smuggling routes, according to the Summit (Lutka) Foundation for Refugees and Displaced Affairs. Niyaz Mustafa contributed to this report.
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