Refugees and migrants arrive on Lesbos after crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece, November 7, 2015. Photo: AFP
HEWLÊR-Erbil, Iraq’s Kurdistan region,— Head of the Summit Foundation for Refugees and Displaced Affairs Ari Jalal said on Wednesday that 150 Iraqi migrants have been detained in the jails in Turkey and that most of them are Kurds.
Jalal told NRT TV that the foundation’s representatives are working to secure their release and return to Iraqi Kurdistan region and Iraq in coming days.
According to the Iraqi representative for refugees in Turkey, in July alone, 113 people from Iraqi Kurdistan have been arrested in Turkey for trying to travel to Europe illegally.
“The Iraqi consulate general in Istanbul has been negligent regarding the release of these Iraqi migrants, who are mostly are Kurdish residents of the provinces of Sulaimani and Erbil and Ranya district,” Jalal said.
“Most of those migrants cannot return to the Kurdistan region and Iraq [on their own] because their passports have been confiscated by smugglers, but they can return to their cities using temporary passports.”
“We were arrested on the road to Bulgaria. The border patrol stopped and beat us,” a Kurdish refugee from Erbil said, sharing his story with K24 TV in Istanbul. “They sent dogs after my friend and took everything we had with us.”
In the past years, many from iraqi Kurdistan Region have tried to illegally migrate to Europe, in the belief they can secure a better life for themselves and their family. They pay large sums of money to smugglers on the Turkish border, and many die on the road.
“In short, smugglers first take money from us, promising safe and guaranteed passage to Europe, but then they force and threaten us somehow to go through the riskiest road, using small boats with no safety measures,” said another Kurdish refugee, describing it is a form of a human trafficking.
Amad Abdulrasul, a Kurdish Consul in the Embassy of Iraq in Istanbul, told K24 TV that in the past six months, they had released more than 1,000 Kurdish refugees in Turkish jails arrested for carrying fake visas.
“Once we ask them about their fraudulent Schengen or Canadian visas, they claim to have paid 5,000 euros to obtain them. Some paid 10,000 euros in Turkey to receive a fake Swedish or British passport. They get arrested in the airports and then sent to jails,” Abdulrasul said.
Since 2014, hundreds of Kurdish refugees died in the Aegean Sea while attempting to enter Europe from Turkey.
According to the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees, 274 Iraqi and Kurdish migrants have died attempting to reach Western Europe, with 144 of those still missing.
Turkey has been the corridor for many in Syria, Iraqi Kurdistan region, and Iraq looking to illegally cross the border and seek asylum in Europe.
According to the federation’s statistics, 240,000 people from the Kurdistan Region and Iraq have traveled to Turkey as tourists in the first six months of 2017. Most of them have gone to Greek and Italian coasts, the statistics indicated.
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