ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The fate of dozens of migrants from a boat that is believed to have sunk due to a technical failure in the Aegean Sea on Tuesday evening is unknown, a Greek coast guard said on Wednesday, with a Kurdish migrant activist telling Rudaw that he had evidence to suggest most of those on board were Kurds.
“The survivors made it onto a dinghy that was tethered to the boat. Only two of them were wearing life jackets,” coast guard spokesman Nikos Kokkalas told the Greek state-run ERT television, AP reported on Wednesday.
The coast guard added that the dead body of one unidentified man was recovered on Wednesday, and that 12 people have so far been rescued and transported to Santorini Island, with all believed to be from Iraq.
“We always presume the worst-case scenario, in this case that 50 people were on the boat,” Kokkalas said, as he explained how the search and rescue operation began on Tuesday night when the Greek coast guard received information that the engine on a vessel carrying migrants had failed. If the coast guard’s estimate proves correct it leaves at least 37 missing.
Ranj Peshdari, a Kurdish migrant activist, in an interview with Rudaw TV on Wednesday has given a higher estimate of the number of migrants on the boat. He said “more than 70 migrants” were on the boat en route to Italy, of which “more than 60” were Kurds, some of whom made contact with him on Tuesday night to tell him that their boat was leaking.
“[The] last time they called me they were still in the water and hung up the phone with a lot of shouting,” Peshdari added.
The International Federation of Iraqi Refugees (IFIR) told Rudaw on Wednesday that the identities of those on board were not yet revealed. According to Hiwa Khidir, head of IFIR in Turkey, the boat sank in the Aegean Sea between Turkey’s Izmir and Athens.
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.
There are only two known survivors of the disaster, including a Kurd from the Region. Bodies of the sixteen identified Iraqi Kurds are to be returned to the Kurdistan Region on Friday, following the return of the body of Sirwan Alipour, an Iranian Kurd, to Tehran on Monday.
Thousands of other Kurds have traveled to Belarus in recent months with the help of Kurdish smugglers, hoping to reach western Europe in a search for jobs and opportunities they feel they cannot access at home where unemployment is high and political tensions, corruption, and instability leave them with little hope for their future.
According to data provided to Rudaw in October by the head of Summit (Lutka) Foundation for Refugee and Displaced Affairs Ari Jalal, in the past seven years over 633,000 people from the Kurdistan Region and Iraq have migrated abroad. Of them, over 260 have died on the way; a number that has significantly increased in recent months.
Additional reporting by Soran Hussein
