Relatives of five Kurdish migrants who died while attempting a crossing of the Aegean Sea await the arrival of their bodies at Erbil airport (left), and a woman mourns in an ambulance over the remains of a body on February 1, 2022. Photo: Safin Hamed/AFP
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The dead bodies of three Kurdish migrants who drowned in one of the late December boat disasters in the Aegean Sea, from a family of six who made the journey, were repatriated to the city of Kirkuk on Tuesday night where they were laid to rest.
Survivor Karwan Ghafur previously told Rudaw that his family had decided to risk it all to make the perilous journey to Europe in order to seek medical treatment for Raz, his eight-year-old daughter who had Down syndrome. She drowned with her mother, Ashti Jubrael, 35, and grandmother Azima Othman, 56.
Distraught Yasin Othman, Azima's brother, told Rudaw on Tuesday that the family had no financial difficulties and that he had plenty of times "begged" them not to make the perilous journey, but instead try a safer way, but his advice was to no avail.
Ghafur and his other two daughters have survived the tragedy, and are now being held at the Amygdaleza detention center near Athens.
He previously recounted the harrowing story to Rudaw.
"The yacht hit a rock and lost control. These two children who were close to me, I managed to save their lives," Ghafur said last month, speaking of his daughters. "I held them up and threw them away from the water. I then returned to save others so I swam towards my wife, my mother-in-law, and my other daughter.”
“When I looked back I noticed the waves had pushed away from the yacht nearly three meters from us. I had no power over it”, he explained. “I did not manage to save them because the yacht sank."
Following the December boat disasters, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said that at least 31 died in three separate incidents between December 21 and 24, with dozens remaining missing.
Kurdish migrants have suffered a catastrophic fate this year. A boat carrying 33 migrants, most of them Kurds, capsized in the English Channel on November 24, in what the International Organization for Migration (IOM) has called the "worst disaster on record" in the Channel.
The Kurdistan Region, mostly known as a safe haven within Iraq, is facing crises of its own, with high unemployment, corruption, political instability, and an economic downturn during the coronavirus pandemic driving many of its people to migrate in recent months.
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has acknowledged the existence of systemic problems and financial hardships and says it is working to address these issues, although it has also on several occasions claimed that the large waves of migration are mainly due to people being taken advantage of by smugglers.
Thousands of other Kurds have traveled to Belarus in recent months with the help of Kurdish smugglers, hoping to reach western Europe where they have suffered deaths, beatings, hunger, and sickness by border guards between the three countries of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland.
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