The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has recommended the partial lifting of the deployment ban to Iraq amid its volatile security situation, saying some parts of the country are safe for Filipino workers.

Foreign Affairs spokesman Raul Hernandez on Tuesday said the department has proposed to the state deployment agency, the Philippine Overseas Em-ployment Administration, that the ban be lifted for the Kurdistan region, an autonomous region of Iraq, in response to its growing foreign labor demand.

“Kurdistan region is relatively safe and therefore because of the demands of jobs in the area, (we will) allow our workers to work and stay in that region,” Hernandez told a press briefing. The DFA has yet to receive a response from the POEA.

Manila continues to observe a deployment ban to Iraq as tensions resumed after the withdrawal of American troops in December 2011, nine years after its invasion that toppled the regime of late strongman Saddam Hussein.

In February, the DFA raised alert level 3 over Iraq and offered to shoulder the evacuation of Filipinos who wished to leave the country. Manila said the “higher than expected surge in terrorist and sectarian violence” in the country prompted the increased security alert warning.

The alert level covers all regions of Iraq except Kurdistan, which is near the country’s border with Turkey.

Around 4,000 Filipinos worked in Iraq when the US still kept bases there. When the Americans left, many have since returned home, some stayed behind to work for foreign contractors while others found jobs in other countries.

The Philippines is among the world’s top labor-exporters with about 8.6 million skilled and unskilled workers scattered abroad, earning more than they could in the country where jobs are scarce and poverty is widespread.

Source: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20120425hea5.html