Kurdish shipwreck survivor blames smuggler for death of wife, baby

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A Kurdish man who lost his wife and child when their boat capsized near the Greek coast this week has blamed the smuggler for their deaths.

“The boat capsized. All the passengers fell into the water. My wife, Naila Mustafa, and child, Noor, who is nine months old, drowned,” Kawez Saadulla, told Rudaw.

Saadulla, who hails from the Chamchamal district in Sulaimani, said that he and his family were on the boat that left Turkey’s Izmir for Greece’s Samos Island on Wednesday night. The boat was carrying 32 passengers.

They were intercepted on route by the Greek navy.

“The driver of the [Greek] boat warned us a number of times to stop. But he [the smuggler] did not stop and drove at a high speed,” Saadulla said.

The boat capsized off the island of Samos.

"Because of the smuggler, my partner and child drowned," said Saadulla.

Peshraw Abdullah, a representative of the Returning Migrants' Association in Greece, told Rudaw on Thursday that there were around 20 people on the boat and confirmed the death of the mother and child.

To Vima, a Greek news outlet, on Thursday reported that four people, a girl and three women, were killed in the shipwreck and 16 people were rescued.

The Hellenic Coastguard has started search and rescue operations to find the missing individuals.

The boat, designed for 17 passengers, was overloaded, according to Saadulla, who said that besides his family, two other young Kurds were onboard. The rest were Afghans, two of whom also drowned.

He added that he is in communication with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to retrieve the bodies of his wife and child.

Every year, tens of thousands of people from Iraq and the Kurdistan Region seek to escape endless crises of lack of employment, political instability, and corruption by joining thousands of others from scores of countries taking perilous routes to Europe.

Around 20,000 people from Iraq and the Kurdistan Region migrated out of the country in 2023 and at least nine of them lost their lives on the dangerous and illegal smuggling routes, according to the Lutka Foundation for Refugees and Displaced Affairs.

On Thursday, Iraq and the United Kingdom signed a security agreement with an investment of £800,000 from the British government to curb people smuggling.

“There are smuggler gangs profiting from dangerous small boat crossings whose operations stretch back through northern France, Germany, across Europe, to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and beyond,” said British home office secretary Yvette Cooper.


Mohammed Malik contributed to this report.