Turkey's coast guard said Monday it rescued 44 migrants stuck on an island after they attempted the crossing to Greece.
The coast guard said in a statement that it dispatched two helicopters and one boat following a rescue request call by a migrant. Aerial footage showed groups of people on an island off the coast of the western province of Balikesir.
Videos showed coast guard officers aiding women and children to board its ship. The statement did not specify the nationalities of the migrants but said they included 13 children.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants have set out from Turkey's coasts in the past few years to try to reach neighboring Greece, which is a member of the European Union. A deal with the EU in 2016 to send those migrants back to Turkey significantly curbed the number of border crossings but many desperate migrants still attempt the journey.
According to figures released by the Turkish coastguard, more than 23,500 refugees and migrants attempting to reach Greece have been intercepted since the beginning of the year – up from 19,732 over the same period in 2017.
October was the seconded busiest month of the year for arrivals into Greece, with 6,010 people reaching the country by land and by sea, according to the International Organization for Migration. The IOM said 166 people had drowned making the crossing so far this year, compared with 60 at this point in 2017.
More Syrians are expected to flee to Greece via Turkey if the government of Bashar al-Assad and its Russian backers launch a final offensive on the last rebel strongholds.
Aid agencies say the EU-Turkey deal, combined with the refusal on the part of EU countries to take in asylum seekers arriving in Greece, had helped create the conditions on Lesbos.
“The EU-Turkey deal was supposed to be a ‘temporary and an extraordinary measure’ to get migratory movement under control and open safe, legal alternatives to smugglers,” said Sophie McCann of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). “Yet three years later, it’s clear the deal has failed to deliver this, and continues to put vulnerable people’s physical and mental well-being at risk. Every day in our clinics on Lesbos and Chios islands, we see people’s medical and mental health deteriorate due to the inhumane conditions they are living in thanks to the containment policies of the EU-Turkey deal.”
Meanwhile, in the central Mediterranean, 81 migrants have refused to disembark from a merchant ship off the coast of Misrata in Libya. The migrants were rescued by the ship’s crew on 10 November, 115 miles east of Tripoli, after leaving Libya on a raft. Fourteen people decided to leave the cargo ship and were transferred to Libya, while the remaining 81 refused to disembark for fear of being sent back to Libyan detention camps. “I prefer to die on this ship,” one of the migrants told MSF when offered to be transferred to a Libyan medical facility.
