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Migrants wait for an Iraqi Airways flight at Minsk Airport (picture taken on November 25, 2021)
Photo: Sergei Bobylev / imago images / ITAR-TASS
The government in Baghdad claims to have brought back around 4,000 Iraqis who were stuck on the Belarusian border with Poland, Lithuania and Latvia since mid-November.
Since November 18, his government has organized "ten flights" between Belarus and Baghdad, said Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein at a joint press conference with his Lithuanian colleague Gabrielius Landsbergis.
According to Iraqi Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed al-Sahaf, a total of 3,817 Iraqi migrants from Belarus and 112 from Lithuania were repatriated in the past two months.
Accordingly, migrants are still stuck in Belarus.
But it is currently impossible to determine their exact number.
Landsbergis said he wanted to make new proposals for working with Iraqi authorities.
Thousands of refugees from the Middle East, mainly from the Kurdish regions of Iraq, have been trying to reach the European Union via Belarus since last summer.
The EU accuses Belarusian head of state Alexander Lukashenko of deliberately smuggling people to the border to avenge EU sanctions.
The Belarusian leadership denies the allegations.
Poland puts the number of people who tried to cross the border from Belarus into Poland in 2021 at just under 40,000.
In the last few weeks of the year in particular, a humanitarian crisis came to a head.
With temperatures hovering around freezing point, thousands of men, women and children held out in the forested areas along the border in hopes of being accepted into the European Union.
Many people lost their lives, they froze, drowned or died of exhaustion.
Even shortly after the turn of the year, there were still hundreds of people in the border area.
fdi/AFP
