Shafaq News

Libya has re-emerged in 2025 as a primary transit route for Iraqis, including those from the Kurdistan Region, seeking to reach Europe, as long-established migration corridors through Turkiye and Tunisia have narrowed under tighter enforcement and shifting regional policies.

As a result, Libya has increasingly absorbed migration flows that once moved through Turkiye and, more recently, Tunisia, despite its reputation as one of the world’s most dangerous migration corridors.

Hundreds of Iraqis attempted the Libyan route this year, with many ending up stranded, detained, or intercepted before reaching Europe. By late 2025, more than 400 had been repatriated through efforts by the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government, offering a partial but telling indicator of the scale of movement.

The pattern became increasingly visible toward the end of the year, when the Iraqi Embassy in Tripoli completed procedures for the voluntary return of dozens of migrants who had entered Libya illegally, adding to a growing series of repatriations that have turned Libya-linked returns into a recurring feature of Iraq’s migration landscape in 2025. 

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Why Libya?

For years, Turkiye served as the main gateway. Iraqis crossed into Turkish territory and moved onward to Greece before heading deeper into Europe. But beginning in 2023, Ankara tightened visa restrictions and accelerated deportations, effectively closing that corridor.

Tunisia then offered a brief alternative, with a visa-on-arrival policy that allowed Iraqis entry for short stays, though smuggling networks moved quickly to exploit it. Flights from Erbil to Tunis filled rapidly, with many passengers heading directly to Sfax, a coastal city that emerged as a departure point for Mediterranean crossings.

That window closed quickly when Tunisian authorities moved to dismantle smuggling networks and restrict Iraqi entry, following a series of detentions involving would-be migrants, including minors. By late 2024, most visa privileges for Iraqis had been suspended.

What remained was Libya, on a route that typically runs through Benghazi. Migrants fly in from Turkiye, Jordan, or Egypt after smuggling networks arrange security permits. From there, they travel roughly 1,200 kilometers overland to Tripoli, before being funneled toward coastal towns such as Zawiya and Sabratha, where overcrowded boats depart for Italy.

The overland leg costs about $1,800, while the sea crossing can reach $15,000, roughly three times the average annual salary in Iraq, according to Numbeo. Some smuggling packages, marketed as end-to-end passage to destinations such as the United Kingdom, are advertised for sums reaching $130,000.

Did It Work?

However, what awaited many of those Iraqis was not what smugglers promised. Migrants frequently end up detained in facilities controlled by armed groups and traffickers in western Libya; families in Iraq often lose contact for months. Passports are confiscated to prevent return or to extract additional payments, turning journeys meant to last weeks into prolonged periods of confinement.

The Summit Foundation for Refugee and Migrant Affairs, a Kurdish NGO known locally as Lutka, warned in October that Iraqi migrants, including Kurds, were being held in conditions amounting to “a humanitarian catastrophe demanding urgent international action.”

Others do not survive the journey. Boats departing Libya’s western coast continue to capsize along the Central Mediterranean, and Iraqi nationals are among the dead. Detention centers, meanwhile, have reported deaths linked to illness, stress, and prolonged confinement while migrants await repatriation or release.

According to the Lutka Foundation, 355 Iraqis have died attempting irregular migration between 2015 and 2025, with at least 250 more still unaccounted for in the Central Mediterranean. The route remains the deadliest in the world, where more than 31,700 migrants have died or gone missing since 2014, including over 3,150 in 2024 alone.

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Recovering the Stranded

Throughout 2025, Iraqi and Kurdish authorities worked to retrieve their citizens from Libya through a series of negotiated returns, often involving small groups released from detention or intercepted before departure.

Iraqi Foreign Ministry figures indicate that scores of citizens were brought home during the year, while the Kurdistan Regional Government separately facilitated the return of several hundred Iraqis from Libya and Tunisia combined. Despite those efforts, dozens remained stranded in Libya by year’s end, with others dispersed across transit countries.

The process has not been without friction, however. In October, MP Muthanna Amin, a member of Iraq’s parliamentary Foreign Relations Committee, accused the Iraqi Embassy in Tripoli of obstructing the return of Kurdish migrants by confiscating passports and plane tickets purchased by the KRG. “Confiscating IDs or passports is a crime,” Amin told reporters. The embassy has yet to directly address the accusation.

What Now?

The repatriations continue, and so does the migration. Economic stagnation, limited employment, political deadlock, and a pervasive sense that the system offers no future have pushed more than 750,000 Iraqis to leave since 2015, according to estimates from the Lutka Foundation. Smuggling networks exploit that desperation, promoting unrealistic promises of welfare, housing, and healthcare upon arrival in Europe.

“Migration has become almost the only option for many young people who lack jobs or stability inside Iraq,” said Aras Mohammed, a 35-year-old from Al-Sulaymaniyah, in an interview with Shafaq News earlier this year.

A regional migration researcher, speaking to Shafaq News on condition of anonymity, framed the issue in structural terms. “Young Iraqis are caught between tightening borders and shifting international agreements,” the researcher said. “For many, irregular migration is the only option left.”