ATHENS - Over 60 Kurdish survivors of one of the recent boat disasters in the Aegean Sea have recounted the horror that 104 migrants encountered on board a ship off the Greek coast, as they grieve the death of their loved ones from a migrant camp a few miles from Athens, where many are now confined.
In the December 24 boat disaster, 11 migrants including nine Kurds have so far been confirmed dead, adding to the increasing toll of victims from deadly shipwrecks in the region.
Survivor Karwan Ghafur told Rudaw’s Alla Shahly on Thursday 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 and grandmother.
Ghafur and his other two daughters have survived the tragedy, and are now being held at the Amygdaleza detention center near Athens.
"The yacht hit a rock and lost control. These two children who were close to me, I managed to save their lives," Ghafur recounted, 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 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."
Awder Rasul lost two of his young daughters, nine-year-old Azhin and 13-year-old Aniya, in the tragedy.
Currently with his wife and two remaining children in Amygdaleza, he described the situation as miserable.
"Despite mourning our loved ones, we are imprisoned. We are calling up [humanitarian] organizations to help repatriate the dead bodies," Rasul urged.
"We witnessed a catastrophe," Nariman Aziz, another survivor who is originally from the Kurdistan Region’s Halabja city, said. "We were all in shambles. It was a heartbreaking calamity that happened to all the people with us."
“We were forced into the yacht. The yacht had been designed to take in just 30 persons. He [the smuggler] had put 104 people in it which led to this disaster. My wife is Rabia Abdulrahman Hama Rasheed, I lost her."
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said last week that at least 31 have died in three separate incidents between December 21 and 24, with dozens remaining missing.
According to Summit (Lutka) Foundation for Refugee and Displaced Affairs, 23 migrants from the Kurdistan Region are missing from the December 21 shipwreck, with just seven rescued. On December 23, nine bodies later identified as citizens from the Region were found.
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.
