Roughly one in nine Iranian families reaching the Tamarchin crossing into Iraqi Kurdistan since early March arrived without at least one immediate relative, a U.N. refugee agency field assessment released Thursday concluded, exposing a smaller and harder displacement channel than the better-documented Turkish route and adding pressure on Kurdish regional authorities to formalize a registration regime they have so far improvised week to week.

The 22-page assessment, conducted over four days by a UNHCR team led from Erbil and supplemented by interviews with arrivals in the towns of Piranshahr and Choman, found that of 1,420 family groups registered at Tamarchin between March 6 and April 5, some 158 reported at least one member — most often an adult son or, in fewer cases, an elderly parent — who had been turned back at the Iranian side of the crossing, detained for questioning, or simply unable to make the journey through the snow-bound passes that link West Azerbaijan province to the Iraqi border.

“This is not the picture we see at Bazargan, and it is not the picture we saw in earlier Syrian flows,” said Karolin Spiekermann, UNHCR’s senior protection officer for Iraq and the report’s lead author, at a briefing in Erbil. “At Tamarchin we are looking at a population that is younger, that is poorer, that more often lacks travel documents, and that arrives in pieces. Reunification will be the central challenge of the coming weeks.”

Tamarchin sits at 1,900 meters in the Hakkari-adjacent corner of the Iran-Iraq border, reachable on the Iranian side only by a single tarred road from Urmia that climbs through Piranshahr and over the Khaneh pass. Unlike the Bazargan crossing into Turkey, which serves an established commercial corridor and which Turkish authorities have processed with a degree of formality, Tamarchin has historically handled pilgrim traffic and small cross-border trade, and the Kurdistan Regional Government’s border directorate had only twelve permanent staff there as of the war’s start.

That has changed. The KRG’s interior minister, Rebar Ahmed, told local journalists Thursday that the directorate had now redeployed forty additional officers to Tamarchin and to the secondary crossing at Bashmagh, near Sulaymaniyah, and that a tented reception site outside Piranshahr — built initially for an Iraqi tribal displacement in 2017 — had been reopened to provide first-night shelter for arrivals who could not be moved onward the same day. He said roughly 11,400 Iranians had been registered through Kurdish channels since the war’s start, a figure substantially lower than the Turkish tally but rising at a faster proportional rate.

“We are receiving people who walked the last six kilometers in the cold,” Ahmed said. “We are not in a position to turn them back, and we will not be in a position to turn them back. We are asking Baghdad and we are asking our international partners for support that matches the reality on the ground.”

The Iraqi federal government’s response has been more cautious. A statement issued late Thursday by the Migration and Displacement Ministry in Baghdad acknowledged the KRG figures and pledged “coordination” but stopped short of declaring a federal emergency or activating the temporary-protection framework that Iraq has, on paper, maintained for regional displacement crises since 2014. Iraqi officials, speaking on background, said Baghdad was concerned about the political optics of designating Iranian arrivals as refugees while Iranian-aligned militias continued to operate inside Iraqi territory, and was instead working through the KRG to channel humanitarian assistance under a less freighted label.

UNHCR’s report identified three principal patterns behind the family separations. The first, accounting for nearly half of the cases documented, involved men of conscription age — generally between 18 and 35 — who were stopped at Iranian internal checkpoints between Tabriz and Urmia and prevented from continuing toward the border. The second, smaller pattern involved elderly relatives, often with mobility limitations, who could not complete the final mountain segment on foot after vehicles had been turned around at Iranian outposts. The third involved children whose travel documents were held by a parent who had been separated earlier in the journey.

“The cases I worry about most are the children,” said Hala Mansour, a Beirut-based regional protection specialist who reviewed the report’s findings at UNHCR’s request. “We have, by the report’s count, forty-one minors at Tamarchin who arrived in the care of a grandparent or an aunt and whose own parents are unaccounted for inside Iran. That is a very particular kind of case file, and it takes years to close.”

Aid workers at the Piranshahr reception site described scenes that confirmed the report’s quantitative findings. A Norwegian Refugee Council coordinator there, reached by phone Thursday afternoon, said three of the previous night’s twenty-one arrivals had been unaccompanied minors traveling with extended family members. The coordinator, Magnus Lindholm, said his team had begun keeping a separate logbook of family-separation cases and was working with the International Committee of the Red Cross’s central tracing agency to register inquiries that could later be matched against any Iranian government list of detainees or restricted travelers.

The medical profile of arrivals at Tamarchin also differed from the Turkish flow. Whereas the Bazargan registrations skewed older and included a notable share of chronic-care patients from Iran’s industrial belt, the Tamarchin arrivals were predominantly Kurdish-speaking residents of West Azerbaijan and Kurdistan provinces, many of them from smaller towns and rural districts where the war’s economic shock — fuel rationing, the collapse of cash remittances, the closure of cross-border petty trade — had bitten faster than in larger cities. UNHCR estimated that 62 percent of Tamarchin arrivals had reported losing primary household income in the four weeks preceding their departure.

In Erbil, the KRG and UNHCR said they would jointly open two additional reception facilities — one near Choman and one in the outskirts of Sulaymaniyah — by the end of next week, and would expand cash-assistance programs to cover an additional 4,000 families. Spiekermann said the agency’s revised flash appeal, which now stood at $780 million following an upward revision late Wednesday, remained 31 percent funded.

A third UNHCR field assessment, focused on smaller flows reported toward Armenia via the Nordooz crossing in northwestern Iran, is expected within ten days, officials said. KRG authorities said they would publish weekly Tamarchin and Bashmagh totals beginning Sunday and would push Baghdad at next week’s federal-regional coordination meeting to clarify the legal status of arrivals already inside Iraqi Kurdistan.