Near Poškonys, border between Lithuania and Belarus (CNN) -
Desperate, scared and crying out for help, they emerge from the darkness: a group of Yazidi migrants, lost in the forests of eastern Europe.
It is a surreal image, and one that has been repeated in many recent nights.
Having survived ISIS persecution in Iraq, here on the Belarusian-Lithuanian border, the Yazidis find themselves caught up in an astonishingly cynical plot.
The authoritarian leader of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has been accused of using these desperate souls as pawns in his high-stakes game with the European Union.
"Don't send me back to Belarus!" Pleads Rimon, from a group of eight migrants, grabbing the arm of a Lithuanian border guard in fear.
The Iraqis yell at another of their compatriots, Abu Osama, still wandering through the dark forest with his 10-year-old son, to submit to the relative safety of arrest.
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The tearful pair emerge from the trees, the son cries in fear, and the father throws himself on the ground and shouts "Allah!"
A helicopter hums in the sky;
the guards listen on their radios that their monitors have captured the heat signatures of 15 other nearby migrants, who are waiting to cross the border.
Over the course of the 24 hours from July 27 to 28, a record 171 people were seized at the border, many of them Iraqis.
So far this year a total of more than 4,000 have been apprehended.
A group of Iraqi Yazidis apprehended in Lithuania.
In a 24-hour period, a record 171 was caught.
'Mass revenge'
European officials say Lukashenko's bureaucracy takes thousands of euros out of each traveler and then uses them as a "weapon," according to Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis, to burden Belarus' neighbor Lithuania.
Officials say the migrants are flown from the Middle East to Minsk and then guided to the Belarusian-Lithuanian border by unspecified facilitators, where they are allowed to cross, unimpeded by the Belarusian border police.
Lithuania has called it "petty", "massive revenge" for the sanctions imposed by the EU after Belarus forced a Ryanair plane to land in Minsk in order to arrest an opposition blogger who was on board.
A Western intelligence official told CNN that the plan could not work without the permission of the Belarusian state and that Lukashenko was likely using the migrants as a way to pressure the EU to negotiate the lifting of sanctions against him.
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Belarus' key ally Russia plays a role in this dark business, the Western intelligence official said, adding that the Russian government used a similar migration scheme in Norway and Finland in 2015. The official said Belarus was very likely it will benefit from advice, information and assistance from Russia to establish this last transit route.
In June, when the number of migrants arriving in the country increased shortly after the sanctions were imposed, Lukashenko said: "We will not detain anyone. After all, we are not their final destination. They are heading to the bright, warm and welcoming Europe."
On Wednesday, Belarusian officials brought CNN and other outlets to their border, as part of an organized tour. Authorities said the migrants who arrived in Belarus did so as tourists and did not pay money to facilitate their crossing. Officials said Belarusian border guards were busy preventing criminal activity and that migrants slipped through gaps in the border fence.
Roman Podlinev, vice chairman of the state border committee, said Lithuania was unable to control the situation and has resorted to "radical methods". He told reporters, including CNN, that: "Despite our agreements, the Lithuanian side is trying to smuggle refugees who applied for asylum in the EU to the Belarusian border and push them into Belarusian territory with force and violence."
The border committee presented videos filmed by its staff that they said were evidence of their claims that the Lithuanian border guard is using force to repel or return migrants and deny them medical treatment.
They also took journalists to a hospital where they introduced a migrant, Hussein, who said that Lithuanian border guards had forced him to return and shot him with a taser.
Lithuanian officials deny the use of force.
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Iraqi migrants walk through the Lithuanian forest.
In response to the increase in the number of migrants trying to enter the country, Lithuania has started to build a thick fence along its border;
which previously relied on dense forest to discourage anyone from crossing.
This weekend, Lithuanian officials said, the number of migrants crossing into the country dropped to zero, after Lithuania sent reinforcements to the border area and began broadcasting warning messages in Arabic, Kurdish, French, Russian and English over speakers.
EU officials also applied diplomatic pressure on Iraq;
in response, the country suspended flights to Minsk and sent a plane to pick up the migrants from Belarus.
Ahmed Al Sahaf, a spokesman for the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, told CNN that the plane returned with 130 of its 400 seats occupied.
But while Lithuania has had some success in handling the crisis in recent days, the threat has changed.
Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis warned that Belarus is now seeking a liberal visa regime with Pakistan or Morocco, to continue the flow of migrants.
And the problem has spread to Lithuania's neighbors, as those already in Belarus seek alternative routes.
On Monday, Poland reported that it had detained a record 349 undocumented immigrants over the weekend, many of whom were Iraqis.
Another of Belarus' EU neighbors, Latvia, detained 140 migrants on Monday and dozens more over the weekend.
His interior minister has proposed a state of emergency and officials have expressed the need for migrant camps.
A member of the Lithuanian Border Guard Service looks through binoculars while patrolling the Belarusian border near the village of Purvenai, Lithuania.
(AP Photo / Mindaugas Kulbis, File)
Police stations overflow
The stories of those who cross are painfully known.
CNN spoke to another group of a dozen Yazidis detained in that dense forest that day.
None of them carried a physical passport;
instead, they had scans of the documents on their phones.
Some bore Yazidi names and showed that they were born in the city of Dohuk, a stronghold of the Iraqi minority whose members were brutally attacked by ISIS.
ISIS murdered thousands of Yazidi men and enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and children between 2014 and 2017, in what the United Nations has called genocide.
One of the men was carrying a US $ 542 round-trip plane ticket from the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.
Former kidnapped by ISIS give voice to enslaved Yazidi women and girls
They say they took a taxi from the Belarusian capital and then followed the GPS through the forest and crossed the border.
They were then found by border guards in the forest, before being taken to a local border guard station, for further processing, and then transported to a detention center.
Border stones mark the line between Belarus and Lithuania.
His home country raises another pressing concern for Lithuania: a possible influx of terrorists.
The intelligence official told CNN that there are real fears that jihadists from the Middle East could infiltrate these routes.
There have already been several cases that caused concern, the official said, but these may have been people who were previously singled out for ties to terrorist groups and then made the trip not for terrorism but for economic reasons.
The flow of people is relentless and has transformed many of Lithuania's sleepy border towns: its police stations are now overflowing with newly arrived immigrants.
In the Poškonys settlement, border guards have handed over their station kitchen to the new arrivals.
In Dieveniškės, local residents protest the conversion of a former apartment block into a detention center for up to 500 migrants.
Those in the crowd say they are not against the migrants, but argue that they should not stay so close to the village nursery school.
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Another camp in Druskininkai is packed with Africans and Iraqis, furious at being herded into military tents and locked in the center during the pandemic.
Many here insist that they did not pay the traffickers to go that far.
But Ali, from Baghdad, said some pay between 5,000 and 6,000 euros ($ 5,900-7,000), even up to 15,000 euros, to a facilitator or trafficker for VIP service to Europe's most precious destination: Germany.
Ali said that the Belarusians "push us, they use us as weapons, because Belarus has problems with Lithuania. As weapons. They use us, but we need this."
Another camp resident, also from Baghdad, added: "We need this because our life is in danger. We don't have a life in Iraq."
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