More than 18,000 jobs had been created, Kurdistan's Ministry of Labor says

Shafaq News/ Kurdistan's Ministry of Labor said it had created jobs to more than 18,000 workers in the Region, senior official said on Sunday.

The Ministry's undersecretary, Zakiya Salih, said in a statement to reporters that the Ministry is working to find jobs to more people in the future.

Salih said that the Ministry has proceeded with the legal process to address the issues related to pensions and social security.

Decades-long economic boom in the autonomous region came to an abrupt halt in 2014 when Baghdad slashed funding to the Kurds after they built their own oil pipeline to Turkey and began exporting oil independently. That left the KRG struggling to meet a bloated public payroll of multi-hundred billions of dinars.

The war against Islamic State and an influx of more than two million people displaced by violence in the rest of Iraq has only compounded the crisis, which is also the result of years of mismanagement and corruption since 2003's U.S.-led invasion.