‘My wife, my sons and my daughter all drowned. They left because life here is so bad with no electricity, no jobs and no salary’ – Morning Star Online

THEY were trying to escape from them, Mohammad says as the Kurdistan Regional Government announced that the bodies of 16 people who drowned in the channel in Novemberwere being returned home.

Now it is the Barzanis that are bringing them back. Even in death they cannot get away from them, he tells me, his voice tinged with sadness.

His best friend is one of the thousands who have fled Iraqi Kurdistan in recent months, desperate to escape a brutally oppressive regime and deepening poverty that has blighted the region.

Having made it from Belarus to France via Germany, his friendis one of the many Kurds camped in Dunkirk waiting to make the crossing.

He didnt make the boat. They had to wait because of the waves. But he says he is still going to try, he tells me. I tried to talk him out of it, told him it is not safe. He will not listen.

Mohammad was one of many I spoke to in Iraqi Kurdistan and was part of the student protests that erupted across the semi-autonomous region in early December.

Their action, which was met with a violent crackdown from Kurdish authorities including allegations of torture, is symptomatic of the deepening crisis across the region.

Many students approached me to say they planned to leave as soon as they could, hoping to make their way to Europe, with London a favoured destination.

I want freedom. This country is like a prison, the people here arent free, one of them explained as they blocked the road outside the university on the outskirts of the city.

I trained as an engineer, a female student says as she walks past. I will be lucky to work in a kitchen.

They feel a sense of hopelessness in a region where there are severe electricity and water shortages and public-sector workers have gone for months without being paid.

Last year at least 13 people, including children, were shot dead during similar protests which saw party offices set on firein anger at a corrupt and undemocratic political system.

Britains Home Secretary Priti Patel says that the country needs to eradicate the so-called pull factors that she insists are the reasons migrants risk their lives on flimsy boats.

What sheand many others continue to ignoreare the many push factors that see thousands of people fleeing Iraqi Kurdistan in sheer desperation.

The region is a war zone, a powder-keg waiting to explode. In the northern Duhok province thousands of villagers have been forced from their homes due to an eight-month bombing campaign by Turkey.

The Nato member state has established around 80 military bases and a military airfield from where it launches drone strikes and missiles that terrorise the local population in an occupation that is aviolation of Iraqs sovereign territory.

Iranian forces are waging war against a US troop presence, launching missile attacks against its compound close to Erbilinternational airport, along with other targets.

Isis has made a resurgence, with security forces telling me that there are thousands of cells taking advantage of instability in the areas contested between the Iraqi federal government and the Kurdistan Regional Government.

The village of Liheban near Kirkuk was recently evacuated because of the renewed threat from the jihadists, whichsecurity forces told me was linked to Turkeys increased presence in the region, which has expanded roughly 20 milesinto Kurdish territory.

Added tothe toxic brew is a brutal internal regime under whichdissent is not tolerated and government critics are jailed, disappeared or even killed.

Once heldup as a beacon of stability and regarded by many liberals as perhaps the only success story of the illegal US invasion and occupation of Iraq which ousted Saddam Hussein, the reality of life under the grip of the Barzani family is very different.

Far from being a model for the rest of the Middle East, the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq has become a deeply divided society riven with corruption and divided into two spheres of influence ruled over by just two families.

The Barzani familys Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) dominates Erbil and Duhok provinces in the north, along with the Kurdistan Regional Government, while the Talabani-run Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) rules in Sulaymaniyah and Halabja.

Both parties operate a feudal-style system of patronage. Jobs in both the public and private sector depend on loyalty to either clan and a corrupt political system that has enriched both families leaves no room for democratic reform.

The media is also controlled by the main parties. Rudaw and Kurdistan 24, the main news sources, are owned by the Barzanis while others are owned by the PUK, with any critical media organisations pushed to the margins.

Those that report on alleged government corruption face closure while their journalists are jailed on spurious charges.

Last week the New Generation-affiliated NRT TV reported 441 million attacks on its website after interviewing US journalist Zack Kopplin following his report on alleged corruption by Masrour Barzani.

It is frequently targeted by the authorities, with its offices even burned to the ground in 2013, and it is often taken off air on spurious grounds and its headquarters stormed by security officials.

At least 81 government critics known as the Badinan activists and journalists were handed lengthy prison sentences earlier this year on espionage charges based on secret evidence and confessions extracted through torture, with the trials slammed by human rights organisations.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Kurdistan Region is the fourth-worst jailer of journalists in the world per capita.

If the Baathists were to stand today, they would win around 80 per cent of the vote, 95-year-old former communist peshmerga leader Abdul Qadir tells me as we sit in his Darbandikhan home in Sulaymaniyah province.

It is a bold claim, I tell him, especially in a region that suffered so much under Saddams tyrannical rule at least 185,000 Kurds were killed in his Anfal campaign alone.

Under Saddam Hussein we had jobs and roads, he says. Now we dont even have those. We are only left with the oppression.

I remember being shocked when I first heard similar sentiments in Halabja earlier in the year.

The town close to the Iranian border is best known in the Western world as the site of a gas attack in which 5,000 Kurds were killed in 1988.

Then, as now, a brutal regime continues to be propped up and supported by Western governments who continue to turn a blind eye to the internal oppression which they tolerate or even encourage for their own interests.

It was certainly these push factors that led the family of Rizgar Hussein to attempt the perilous crossing from France to Britain last month. It was a journey that ended in tragedy.

My wife, my sons and my daughter all drowned. They left because life here is so bad with no electricity, no jobs and no salary.

He first met his wife Khazal Hussein in a refugee camp just outside the city of Kermanshah in Rojhilat, the name for Iranian Kurdistan.

They married and moved to Darbandikhan in Iraqi Kurdistans Sulaymaniyah province in 2004 where they had their children; daughter Hadia who was 22, son Mubin, 16, and younger daughter Hasti who was just seven.

She was my best friend, he says tearfully. As were my children. Every day with them is now just a happy memory.

He has been living with his father-in-law in the southern city of Kalar since the tragedy and thinks about his family every day.

Left with nothing after selling his house he has had no contact from the Kurdistan Regional Government nor the French authorities where the bodies of his loved ones were held in a morgue.

Rizgar did not even know the fate of his family, waiting anxiously for news but fearing the worst after his daughters mobile phone lost signal and eventually its battery.

But he knows they waited for hours in the freezing cold water of the Channel for someone to rescue them and had been rebuffed by the British authorities despite a number of phone calls pleading for help.

He shared images showing the location of his family in the boat when they called the British coastguard. His daughter was told while the cold gripped their bodies that they were not their responsibility.

Officials allegedly insisted that they were in French waters and Rizgar says that they were simply left to drown.

They were not in French waters, Rizgar said. You can see clearly that they were close to Britain. Someone should have rescued them.

This has been confirmed by the only two survivors from the fateful trip along with geolocation data shared by other passengers.

His anger is directed at both British and French authorities and he wants them to be charged with neglect a case was lodged by an NGO on behalf of two of the families earlier this week.

He is waiting to be reunited with his loved ones, never imagining that he would never see them alive again after they began the journey to start a new life.

But nobody would help him other than the Foundation for Refugee and Displaced Affairs who asked him for a sample of DNA to match with the bodies that had been recovered.

I tried to go to France so I could see my family and identify them, he explained. But they refused to give me a visa.

In this country [Kurdistan] visas are only for the rich and corrupt people, not for the poor like me.

He begged the British people to hold the government to account and show support for the people of Iraqi Kurdistan, especially those who lost so much in the freezing waters of the Channel.

The silence of the all-party parliamentary group for Kurdistan is perhaps not surprising considering its history of funding by Barzani-linked oil companies, which pay tens of thousands to provide secretarial support.

That tale of corruption is a story for another day.

But while it acts as the regimesmouthpiecein Westminster it will be up to the people of Britain to be the voice of the Kurds on the streets and in their communities.

It will be here that the fight for justice for Rizgar and those that drownedwill be won.

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'My wife, my sons and my daughter all drowned. They left because life here is so bad with no electricity, no jobs and no salary' - Morning Star Online