"We received them for humanitarian reasons, and they are under our protection and we gave them refugee status," said Anwar Haji Othman, Kurdish deputy minister for the local peshmerga security forces.

"We will not hand them over to the Syrian government because they are Kurdish and it is our right to protect them," he said.

Othman said they crossed at the common border point between Iraq's Kurdistan and Syria, having run "away from the Syrian army."

Iraq has shied away from imposing punitive measures against Syria as President Bashar al-Assad's regime carries out a bloody crackdown on an uprising against his rule in which rights groups say 7,600 people have died.