On Wednesday, Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Prime Minister Masrour Barzani received Syria’s Minister of Education Mohammad Abdulrahman Turko.

According to the KRG readout, the two officials emphasized the importance of strengthening relations between the Kurdistan Region and Syria in the field of education.

Minister Turko thanked the KRG for hosting hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees and highlighted the steps taken by the Syrian government to promote education in the Kurdish language.

Prime Minister Barzani expressed the KRG’s readiness to provide all necessary cooperation and coordination with the Syrian government to further strengthen bilateral relations.

As of April 2026, there are 263,501 registered Syrian refugees living in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, according to official figures from the Kurdistan Region Statistics Office.

On July 21, Mohammad Yaqoub al-Omar, Director of Syria’s Consular Affairs Department, visited the Kurdistan Region to lay the groundwork for establishing a consulate in Erbil.

In a post on X, al-Omar noted that the initiative is intended to facilitate official procedures for Syrian citizens and improve the quality of consular services available to them.

Syrians in Erbil have welcomed the news.

“If there is a Syrian consulate here in Erbil, maybe people can get their IDs, passports, and family documents,” Dara Shakran camp resident Faysal Qasim Ibrahim told Kurdistan Chronicle.

Jihan, another Syrian national living in the Kurdistan Region, told Kurdistan Chronicle that the opening of the consulate would facilitate family reunification and help Syrians with paperwork in the Kurdistan Region, including IDs and expired passports. 

“People could officially have any document officially recognized at the consulate [instead of via middle men],” she said.