Statelessness Working Paper Series No. 2016/02 of legal identity. Islamic State takeover of territory in recent years has left many Internally Displaced Persons in Iraq unable to acquire identity documents necessary to access basic services,12 while their unregistered new-born children, like those of Syrian refugees in the country, can be at increased risk of becoming stateless.13 In KR-I, stateless Kurds – like fellow Syrians – have come into direct and regular contact with agencies of the humanitarian community, and qualify for assistance and international protection under UNHCR’s refugee mandate. In contrast, while the non-refugee stateless are also mandated Persons of Concern to UNHCR,14 due to political sensitivities back home in Syria, the stateless Kurds there found themselves positioned “beyond UN assistance.”15 Despite significantly increased access to the community in the Kurdistan Region, UNHCR has done little to map statelessness among the Syrian Kurdish refugee population. Rather, for both convenience and in order to provide the highest possible level of protection, UNHCR does not distinguish between the various nationality statuses – citizen/ajnabi/maktum – when determining and registering Syrians as refugees.16 Indeed, this is in line with UNHCR’s statistical reporting whereby ‘stateless refugees’ are counted as refugees and excluded from data on stateless persons in order to avoid double counting.17 Likewise, it is the policy of the Kurdistan Regional Government not to ask about the nationality status of Syrian refugees.18 As such, ajanib and maktumeen are provided the same legal protection as other refugees. Besides a few reports of difficulties and delays in completing residency paperwork,19 those Kurdish refugees who are also stateless do not appear to experience specific protection concerns while in the Kurdistan Region. An indirect (and adverse) result of such policies, however, is the lack of reliable information on the number of stateless Syrian Kurds, since their statelessness is invisible within official statistics.20 It is important to note that while the scale of the statelessness problem and the potential vulnerabilities of this population are largely obscured when in the Kurdistan Region, protection concerns are often (re-)activated as stateless Kurds travel to third countries outside Syria and Iraq. More thorough mapping of statelessness in Kurdistan may, therefore, be particularly relevant given the large number of stateless Kurds who have left KR-I and/or Syria and risked journeying illegally to Europe over the last year. Many people remain stateless in the Kurdistan Region as a result of two significant limitations associated with the scope and implementation of Decree No. 49’s provisions for naturalisation. 21 Firstly, its failure to mention the maktumeen-status Kurds means that they are in practice excluded 12 Julia St. Thomas King and Dennis Ardis, ‘Identity crisis? Documentation of the displaced in Iraq’ (November 2015) Humanitarian Exchange 65 <http://odihpn.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/HE_65_web.pdf>. 13 Salar Salim and Susannah George, ‘Thousands of Syrian refugee children in Iraq left in “legal limbo”’ The Independent (29 November 2015) <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/thousands-of-syrian-refugee-children-in-iraqleft-in-legal-limbo-a6753531.html>. 14 UNHCR/Division of International Protection (DIP), Note on the Mandate of the High Commissioner for Refugees and his Office, (2013) p. 8. 15 Taghee Moas, ’62 years of Human Rights, yet no rights since ‘62’, (Fall 2010) Rights in Review 3, p. 10 <www.jhr.ca/downloads/Rightsinreview_Fall_2010.pdf>. 16 Stateless status is not currently indicated in the refugee profiles maintained on UNHCR’s specialized ProGres registration software for those in the Kurdistan Region. 17 Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, The World’s Stateless (Wolf Legal Publishers, 2014), p. 10. 18 In an interview during March 2016, an official stated that the KR-I government “refuses to respect the discriminatory differentiations imposed on Kurds by the Syrian government.” 19 It is perhaps significant to note that these cases were reported by stateless Kurds based in Sulaimaniya governorate in KR-I. 20 Challenges associated with accurately quantifying statelessness have been highlighted in Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, The World’s Stateless (Wolf Legal Publishers, 2014). 21 Limitations of the decree are further compounded by the dimension of gender discrimination already built into Syrian nationality legislation, as is the case in many other countries in the Middle East region. 3