About 35,000 refugees, believed to be mainly Syrian Kurds, have entered Iraq since last Thursday, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said.

At least 5,100 people crossed the border on Tuesday, fleeing the civil war in Syria.

Jumbe Omari Jumbe of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) told reporters in Geneva that refugees arriving at two border crossings in the region were exhausted and dehydrated after walking long distances in spiraling desert temperatures.

Chaotic scenes

The influx began last Thursday when the Kurdistan regional government authorities in northern Iraq opened access across the newly-built Peshkhabour pontoon bridge, UNHCR said. The bridge has now been reserved for commercial traffic and refugees have been directed to use the Sahela crossing to the south, it added.

“This new exodus from Syria is among the largest we have seen in the conflict,” UNHCR spokesman Dan McNorton told reporters.

Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan, reporting from Sahela, witnessed chaotic scenes as the refugees were to be transported by bus to camps in the town of Erbil.

“Trying to move these people to camps is a difficult business and in the fierce sun, tempers often flare," he said.

“The UN wants women and children to go first, but the procedure has broken down. So now the buses are mobbed.”

Nearly half the estimated 4,800 people who crossed on Monday were children, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said.

UNICEF has identified at least 80 unaccompanied teenage boys sent across the border by their families for safety or to find work.

“Many are below 12 years old, and the younger ones were particularly dehydrated and exhausted after the four or five hour walk across the border in the scorching heat,” UNICEF spokeswoman Marixie Mercado said.

More than 1.9 million Syrians have fled to neighboring countries and North Africa since the uprising began in March 2011 and Syria descended into civil war.

PHOTO CAPTION

Syrian refugees cross into Iraq at the Peshkhabour border point in Dahuk, 260 miles (430 kilometers) northwest of Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2013.

Aljazeera