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Migrants being rescued after their boat sank in the Aegean Sea, off the coast of southwestern Turkey on June 17, 2019. File photo: AFP
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – One of the survivors of the recent migration tragedy in the Aegean Sea recounted on Saturday the horror of watching the Greek waters take the lives of families and children, washing away their dream of reaching western Europe as they drowned one-by-one.
In an exclusive talk with Rudaw, the surviving migrant, who preferred to stay anonymous said that on Wednesday evening, the smugglers drove the group of over 100 migrants who were staying at a hotel in Turkey’s Marmaris city to a jungle where they were later taken to the port.
“They had promised us a 16-meter boat would be ready to take us, but there was a 12-meter boat when we arrived. The number of migrants was 103 people at the time; 84 adults and 19 children. We were all forced into the boat,” the survivor who is in his late thirties told Rudaw’s Salar Raza over WhatsApp from a camp in Athens, where he and the other survivors are staying.
The boat was too small for the large number of migrants but the smugglers managed to pack the desperate 103 people, including Kurds, into the boat that set off at around 2:00 am, marking a journey of perished hopes and dreams.
Greece is one of the main routes into the European Union for refugees and migrants. However, the flow tapered off following the arrival of nearly one million people, including Syrian Kurds, in Europe after crossing to Greek islands close to Turkey in 2015.
The boat started suffering from issues four hours after its departure, the survivor said.
“There were two seamen on board who said they were from Kyrgyzstan, they fixed the problem,” the migrant said. “We sailed until 2:00 pm of December 23 [Thursday] until the boat broke down completely and its engines stopped working. The seamen lost hope. The waves were very strong and they took the boat with them.”
The tidal surge took the boat to a rocky island as it slammed several rocks, breaking pieces of it and leading to the fall of at least 11 people into the waters, according to the survivor.
“Three people from Kirkuk, including a grandmother, her daughter and her granddaughter and a family of seven, among them a women, who were originally from Halabja also drowned,” he said, adding “the others have survived.”
Among the people on the boat were a number of Kurds from the Kurdish areas of Iran who tied the boat to rocks, “which is how they managed to save most of the migrants’ lives.”
At least 30 people died when three separate migrant boats sank in the Aegean since Wednesday, AFP reported Greece’s coastguards as saying.
The details of the incidents and the total number of migrants the boats carried remain unclear.
Fryad Ali and his wife, who hoped to reach Greece or Italy, lost their two children in the Greek waters after their boat capsized.
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 early Sunday, 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.
An estimated 193,443 people have left the Kurdistan Region and Iraq by irregular means since 2018, according to data from the Summit Foundation for Refugee and Displaced Affairs (Lutka).
The Kurdistan Region, often called a safe haven within Iraq, is facing crises of its own - high unemployment, corruption, political instability, and an economic downturn during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has acknowledged the existence of systemic problems and financial hardships but says it is working to address these issues.
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