Hungary Thanks Kurdistan for Embracing Diverse Religious, Ethnic Groups

The Hungarian government has thanked the Kurdistan Region for embracing diverse religious and ethnic groups with more than one million IDPs and Syrian refugees.

The remarks were made by Tristan Azbej, Minister of State for Christian Affairs in the Hungarian government, during a meeting with prominent Kurdish leader and president of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), Masoud Barzani, in Erbil on Saturday.

Barzani's office said in a statement that the Hungarian Minister expressed his country's appreciations for Kurdistan Region's hosting of hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons over the past years.

Commending the role of the Kurdistan Region in consolidating peaceful coexistence between the different religious and ethnic groups, Azbej reaffirmed that Hungary is proud to have participated, alongside the Kurdistan Region's Peshmerga forces, in the fight against the Islamic State (IS), stressing that the European country will continue to cooperate with the Kurdistan Region.

Barzani, in return, thanked Hungary for assisting the Kurdistan Region during the war against terrorism, the statement concluded.

The meeting came while Pope Francis is in Iraq for a historic visit to the country where he will also head to Erbil on Sunday morning, a day after he was welcomed by Iraqi PM Mustafa al-Kadhimi at the Baghdad International Airport during an official ceromony.