KRG refuses to hand over Kurdish opponents to Iran

Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) won’t hand over any member of the opposition parties to the Iranian authorities, spokesperson Safin Dizayee said yesterday.

“We refuse to extradite the Iranian dissidents in the region, who have been identified by the United Nations as refugees,” Dizayee told Iraqi News Agency (INA), stressing that the KRG “must respect the international law protecting refugees”.

Those groups, Diyazee added, have been in the Kurdistan region and Iraq since the beginning of 1980s under agreements made with the former Iraqi regime.

He called on the Iranian Kurdish opposition groups “not to use the Kurdistan region as a base to attack the security and stability of the neighbouring countries.”

Read: Kurdish militants kill 10 Iran Guards at Iraqi border post

“We believe the issue won’t be solved militarily, but through peaceful talks,” the KRG official noted.

On Tuesday, the Iranian Chief of Staff, Major General Mohammad Bagheri, warned that his country would strike the northern-Iraqi Kurdish region if Iranian opposition groups in the area are not handed over to Tehran.

On 8 September, the Iranian military launched a missile attack on a refugee camp in the Iraqi city of Koya, which holds the headquarters of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDP-I).