In front of his shop, located in the Karrada district in the center of the capital, Baghdad, a young clothes seller, Ali Saeed, 25, mourns his bad luck after his friend in 2014 offered him the opportunity to emigrate from Iraq to Europe, but he refused because of the dangerous journey that the immigrant takes there at the time.
Said told Al-Jazeera Net, "I no longer want to stay in Iraq today because of the deteriorating political, economic and even social conditions, so life has become very difficult."
Karar al-Maliki says that he immigrated to Finland, where he gained opportunities to study, work and a decent life (Al-Jazeera)
A lost future
Many young Iraqis prefer to emigrate abroad in search of a better future because of the difficulty in obtaining job opportunities and the large number of corruption and mismanagement that Iraq suffers from.
Karar al-Maliki, 23, said in an interview with Al-Jazeera Net, that he traveled to Europe when he was 17 years old due to his loss of hope in his country due to the spread of corruption, the miserable political situation, the deterioration of services and the lack of job opportunities.
He added that he was disappointed by the lack of a job opportunity for university graduates and the lack of light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq, so he migrated to Finland in search of a better future.
Karrar Al-Maliki explained that this country gave him hope for life again, and provided him with study and work opportunities in a very short time, not exceeding five years, and he is now a student in mechanical and production engineering, and he also works as a teacher of Finnish language for foreigners and Arabic for Finns.
Saif Ali believes that the poor security and living conditions in Iraq are pushing to emigrate (Al-Jazeera)
Saif Ali Khazal (23 years) agrees with Karrar al-Maliki's opinion, considering that "the Iraqi youth today thinks about immigration continuously, and his desire to do so increases daily because of the poor security and living conditions in the first place, and immigration outside the country has become the main idea and goal of the Iraqi youth." "To build their future and live in safety, and some of them are willing to pay large sums in exchange for escaping from the dire reality and living a decent and safe life."
Khazal - who is currently residing in Turkey - believes that Iraq is at the forefront of the unfit countries to live at present, due to many reasons, the most prominent of which are assassinations, murders, explosions, lack of job opportunities, high unemployment and poverty, and living in light of political parties competing for the spoils of power and theft of the country's goods. .
Most of the Iraqi youth frequent cafes due to the high unemployment rate (Al-Jazeera)
For his part, Ahmed Dhaif (26 years) says that emigration outside Iraq has become the wish of most Iraqi youth due to wars, violence and lack of job opportunities, as well as because of the corruption that has spread in most government institutions and mismanagement of the state.
And he considered that all this generated frustration among Iraqis and pushed them to search for a decent life free of these problems that have become eternal in the country.
Dhaif pointed out that many of his friends are currently outside Iraq and live a decent life.
The educational researcher, Dr. Arak Ghanem points out that getting rid of unemployment, poverty, destitution, corruption, and the fragile security situation in the country are among the most prominent reasons for the migration of Iraqi youth abroad, and confirms in an interview with Al-Jazeera Net that the idea of travel and immigration appeals to them because of the spirit of adventure, risk and challenge that they have, while they dream With a decent life free from the troubles that their country is experiencing.
There is no official statistics on the number of Iraqis who have migrated from the country since the US invasion in 2003 or after the increase in asylum abroad after the Islamic State took control of large parts of the north and northwest of the country during 2014 and 2015, but some statistics issued by the concerned authorities in Iraq estimate The number is in the hundreds of thousands.