By Sharmila Devi

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - More than 11,000 Syrians have fled the town of Kobane to the Kurdistan region of Iraq, with almost 8,000 of them arriving in the past month, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Monday.

Kurdish fighters have been battling Islamic State militants in Kobane on the Turkish border for more than a month. The surge in Syrian, mostly Kurdish, refugees is a “fourth wave” of them to arrive this year, according to the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG).

The first wave came as the war in Syria intensified earlier this year; the second came after Islamic State jihadis moved into Nineveh province in northern Iraq in June; and the third came in August when ISIS targeted the Yazidi community in Sinjar mountain.

Their needs are far from being met, with international donors so far funding only 30 per cent for the refugees and 20 per cent for the Iraqi displaced, Harry Schute, an advisor to the KRG, said in a recent briefing.

There are more than 219,000 registered Syrian refugees and an estimated 1.8 million displaced people in Iraq, the UNHCR said.

The most recent surge in Syrian arrivals followed the decision by Kurdish President Massoud Barzani to open the Ibrahim Khalil checkpoint on the border between Turkey and Iraq’s Dohuk governorate, the UNHCR said.

As a result of the recent fighting in Kobane, 7,944 Syrian refugees entered through the checkpoint in the first two weeks of October. Some 5,000 of them were transferred to camps within the Dohuk and Sulaymaniyah governorates.

The UNHCR said under a decision taken by the KRG’s Ministry of Interior, all the new mostly Kurdish arrivals were then transferred to camps within the governorate of Erbil, which is also the regional, Kurdish capital.

The ministry maintains tighter controls over the movement of Iraqi Arabs in particular who have fled to the north because of conflict elsewhere in Iraq.

An estimated 31 per cent of the new Syrian arrivals are children, with 24 per cent under four-years-old.

“The approaching winter season, the increased number of refugees and internally displaced people, combined with limited resources, pose a serious challenge for the humanitarian community in the coming months,” the agency said in its operational update for October 1-15.

Rudaw