Christians in the Kurdistan region of Iraq have filed complaints against Kurdish residents who are allegedly attacking and seizing their lands in Dahuk and Erbil.

The complaints about the land seizure were filed on June 15 by the Christian citizens in Kurdistan. They also said the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has not exerted sufficient effort to address the crisis, which has been dragging on for quite some time already, Al-Monitor reports.

(Reuters/Ahmed Jadallah) Children of a Christian family, who fled from the violence in Mosul, stay at a school in Arbil, in Iraq's Kurdistan region, June 27, 2014.

Christians from eight villages in the province of Dahuk attempted to protest against the encroachment on their land on April 13, but the KRG had blocked them from entering the headquarters. Still, some of the Christian villagers managed to arrive at the location and stage their protest.

According to a Human Rights Watch report, Christian citizens in Kurdistan are living a difficult life because of the KRG's restrictions, which prevent them from staking their rights to their own properties. The land seizure has been going on since the 1980s, and the Christians were eventually displaced in 1986 when Saddam Hussein's administration demolished the said villages.

When the military rule ended, the Kurds returned to the Christian villages and seized the territories while the real residents were still absent, according to accounts by some of the Christian residents.

In an interview with Al-Monitor, Ninevah Studies Center director Michael Benjamin said the KRG appears to be aware of the crisis and has launched several attempts from 2001 to 2010 to address the issue. Unfortunately, none of those initiatives succeeded.

"In the Dahuk governorate alone, there is a list of 56 villages where the area of seized land is estimated at 47,000 acres. This list only includes villages whose residents have filed complaints with the relevant courts," said Benjamin. "There are villages whose residents were forced to abandon them from the early 1930s onward due to instability, persecution and infringement upon their rights."

Meanwhile, other Christians in the rest of Iraq have fled because of the threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). After the terrorist group gave them an ultimatum, the 1.4 million Christians in Iraq have been reduced to only around 250,000, Christian Today details.

Minority Rights Group head Mark Lattimer said the war has taken a deadly toll on Christianity in Iraq. Some of the Christian leaders in the war-torn country also told him that the Christian population possibly could not survive outside of the Kurdistan Region.