As Iraqi and Syrian Migrants Leave Belarus, Some Are Afraid to Go Home

Iraqi migrants, who voluntarily registered for an evacuation flight from Belarus, board a bus upon arriving at Erbil International Airport, in Erbil, Iraq, November 26, 2021. (Reuters)
Iraqi migrants, who voluntarily registered for an evacuation flight from Belarus, board a bus upon arriving at Erbil International Airport, in Erbil, Iraq, November 26, 2021. (Reuters)
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As Iraqi and Syrian Migrants Leave Belarus, Some Are Afraid to Go Home

Iraqi migrants, who voluntarily registered for an evacuation flight from Belarus, board a bus upon arriving at Erbil International Airport, in Erbil, Iraq, November 26, 2021. (Reuters)
Iraqi migrants, who voluntarily registered for an evacuation flight from Belarus, board a bus upon arriving at Erbil International Airport, in Erbil, Iraq, November 26, 2021. (Reuters)

Exhausted after several failed attempts to enter Poland amid freezing temperatures, Saeed Jundi and his family of Iraqi Yazidis had just made it back to the Belarusian capital when he said security forces showed up at their rented apartment.

When he confirmed the family was from Iraq, he said they were taken to the airport and deported.

Jundi, his wife and their three children landed in Iraq's Kurdistan region on Nov. 28, two days after Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko had told migrants at the border with Poland that they would not be forced to leave.

The family was among hundreds of migrants from Iraq and elsewhere flown out of Belarus in recent weeks after failed attempts to enter the European Union - where they were seeking a better future.

Some of them say they had no choice, while others saw little alternative given how hard it was to cross into Poland and because of their treatment at the hands of border guards.

Since last month, Iraq's government has chartered evacuation flights for over 3,100 Iraqis in Belarus.

Hemn Amin, a 29-year-old Iraqi Kurd from the town Khurmal, was among them.

He said Belarusian border guards beat him and that he was pushed back and forth between the Belarusian and Polish border several times. He was then taken to a warehouse in Grodno region where hundreds of other migrants had gathered.

Amin and about 40 other Iraqis booked a plane ticket in order to be allowed to leave.

They boarded buses hoping to get off in Minsk, but were taken straight to the airport, he said.

"We waited in the airport for about five days, in an overcrowded hall guarded by the police," Amin said.

The Belarusian foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Fouad Hamad, Belarus' honorary consul in Iraqi Kurdistan from where many migrants started their journey, said beatings at the border were "a possibility", but not in cities.

He said migrants in cities would be detained and deported when their visas expired "according to the law" and that he received regular calls from Iraqis asking him to help relatives detained in Minsk for having overstayed their tourist visas.

Safeen Dizayee, head of the Kurdistan regional government's foreign relations in Erbil, told Reuters that none of those aboard the flights chartered by the government had said they were being deported against their will.

"If they overstayed their visas, naturally each country has their rules and regulations," Dizayee said. "Whatever measures Belarus takes, it is their jurisdiction."

He said authorities in Belarus and Poland should investigate allegations of abuse of migrants along the border.

Syrians stuck

Officials and migrants say hundreds of migrants remain stuck in Belarus, having spent thousands of dollars on a journey they had hoped would end in the EU. Among them are Syrians, some of whom do not want to return to their homeland.

"We are being contacted and receive reports about different cases, including of Syrians, some of whom would like to return and some still hope to be able to cross to Poland and some wishing to reunite with their families in the EU," UNHCR Senior Communications Officer, Natalia Prokopchuk, told Reuters.

On Wednesday, private Syrian airline Cham Wings chartered the first evacuation flight for Syrians wishing to return to Damascus, with about 97 passengers on board.

Speaking over the telephone from a small hostel in Minsk, a Syrian man from Halab who asked to not be named said he and 12 other Syrians traveling with him were barely leaving their rooms anymore, fearing deportation.

He said his tourist visa expired nearly two months ago and he had nowhere to go. He has been banned from re-entering Lebanon, where he lived for the last six years, and fears he will be punished if he flies back to Damascus because he has not carried out his military service.

Dozens of Syrian respondents told an online poll set up by migrants that they did not want to go back to Syria from Belarus for fear of retribution from the authorities.

The Syrian government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A 27-year-old Syrian who flew from Damascus to Minsk on a tourist visa said he managed to delay serving in the military by continuing his studies. He has now completed his masters degree and fears he will be enrolled by force should he land in Syria.

Meanwhile, the Syrian from Halab said his only option may be to return to the forests between Belarus and Poland to try and cross again.



'We Will Die from Hunger': Gazans Decry Israel's UNRWA Ban

 Itimad Al-Qanou, a displaced Palestinian mother from Jabalia, eats with her children inside a tent, amid Israel-Gaza conflict, in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, November 9, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Itimad Al-Qanou, a displaced Palestinian mother from Jabalia, eats with her children inside a tent, amid Israel-Gaza conflict, in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, November 9, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
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'We Will Die from Hunger': Gazans Decry Israel's UNRWA Ban

 Itimad Al-Qanou, a displaced Palestinian mother from Jabalia, eats with her children inside a tent, amid Israel-Gaza conflict, in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, November 9, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Itimad Al-Qanou, a displaced Palestinian mother from Jabalia, eats with her children inside a tent, amid Israel-Gaza conflict, in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, November 9, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed

After surviving more than a year of war in Gaza, Aisha Khaled is now afraid of dying of hunger if vital aid is cut off next year by a new Israeli law banning the UN Palestinian relief agency from operating in its territory.

The law, which has been widely criticised internationally, is due to come into effect in late January and could deny Khaled and thousands of others their main source of aid at a time when everything around them is being destroyed.

"For me and for a million refugees, if the aid stops, we will end. We will die from hunger not from war," the 31-year-old volunteer teacher told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

"If the school closes, where do we go? All the aspects of our lives are dependent on the agency: flour, food, water ...(medical) treatment, hospitals," Khaled said from an UNRWA school in Nuseirat in central Gaza.

"We depend on them after God," she said.

UNRWA employs 13,000 people in Gaza, running the enclave's schools, healthcare clinics and other social services, as well as distributing aid.

Now, UNRWA-run buildings, including schools, are home to thousands forced to flee their homes after Israeli airstrikes reduced towns across the strip to wastelands of rubble.

UNRWA shelters have been frequently bombed during the year-long war, and at least 220 UNRWA staff have been killed, Reuters reported.

If the Israeli law as passed last month does come into effect, the consequences would be "catastrophic," said Inas Hamdan, UNRWA's Gaza communications officer.

"There are two million people in Gaza who rely on UNRWA for survival, including food assistance and primary healthcare," she said.

The law banning UNRWA applies to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Gaza and Arab East Jerusalem, areas Israel captured in 1967 during the Six-Day War.

Israeli lawmakers who drafted the ban cited what they described as the involvement of a handful of UNRWA's thousands of staffers in the attack on southern Israel last year that triggered the war and said some staff were members of Hamas and other armed groups.

FRAGILE LIFELINE

The war in Gaza erupted on Oct. 7, 2023, after Hamas attack. Israel's military campaign has levelled much of Gaza and killed around 43,500 Palestinians, Gaza health officials say. Up to 10,000 people are believed to be dead and uncounted under the rubble, according to Gaza's Civil Emergency Service.

Most of the strip's 2.3 million people have been forced to leave their homes because of the fighting and destruction.

The ban ends Israel's decades-long agreement with UNRWA that covered the protection, movement and diplomatic immunity of the agency in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

For many Palestinians, UNRWA aid is their only lifeline, and it is a fragile one.

Last week, a committee of global food security experts warned there was a strong likelihood of imminent famine in northern Gaza, where Israel renewed an offensive last month.

Israel rejected the famine warning, saying it was based on "partial, biased data".

COGAT, the Israeli military agency that deals with Palestinian civilian affairs, said last week that it was continuing to "facilitate the implementation of humanitarian efforts" in Gaza.

But UN data shows the amount of aid entering Gaza has plummeted to its lowest level in a year and the United Nations has accused Israel of hindering and blocking attempts to deliver aid, particularly to the north.

"The daily average of humanitarian trucks the Israeli authorities allowed into Gaza last month is 30 trucks a day," Hamdan said, adding that the figure represents 6% of the supplies that were allowed into Gaza before this war began.

"More aid must be sent to Gaza, and UNRWA work should be facilitated to manage this aid entering Gaza," she said.

'BACKBONE' OF AID SYSTEM

Many other aid organizations rely on UNRWA to help them deliver aid and UN officials say the agency is the backbone of the humanitarian response in Gaza.

"From our perspective, and I am sure from many of the other humanitarian actors, it's an impossible task (to replace UNRWA)," said Oxfam GB's humanitarian lead Magnus Corfixen in a phone interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"The priority is to ensure that they will remain ... because they are essential for us," he said.

UNRWA supports other agencies with logistics, helping them source the fuel they need to move staff and power desalination plants, he said.

"Without them, we will struggle with access to warehouses, having access to fuel, having access to trucks, being able to move around, being able to coordinate," Corfixen said, describing UNRWA as "essential".

UNRWA schools also offer rare respite for traumatised children who have lost everything.

Twelve-year-old Lamar Younis Abu Zraid fled her home in Maghazi in central Gaza at the beginning of the war last year.

The UNRWA school she used to attend as a student has become a shelter, and she herself has been living in another school-turned-shelter in Nuseirat for a year.

Despite the upheaval, in the UNRWA shelter she can enjoy some of the things she liked doing before war broke out.

She can see friends, attend classes, do arts and crafts and join singing sessions. Other activities are painfully new but necessary, like mental health support sessions to cope with what is happening.

She too is aware of the fragility of the lifeline she has been given. Now she has to share one copybook with a friend because supplies have run out.

"Before they used to give us books and pens, now they are not available," she said.