IRAQI MIGRANTS RETURN FROM BELARUS

Iraq repatriated a second wave of more than 600 migrants from Belarus on Friday after they gave up, at least for now, on a disastrous attempt to try to reach the European Union via its eastern borders.

Two Iraqi Airways charter flights landed before dawn in Irbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous zone of northern Iraq controlled by Kurds, then went on to the national capital, Baghdad.

One of the returning migrants, Shaho Omar, 27, said he and his friends had been trying to reach Germany and then go on to Britain. But they abandoned their plans after hearing that at least 27 migrants died Wednesday in a failed attempt to cross the English Channel from France to Britain aboard a f limsy inf latable boat.

“What happened to them could have happened to us; that shocked us,” he said, adding that rough treatment by the Belarus border police and the free flight home offered by Iraqi authorities had persuaded him and others to leave.

“The police took our money. They took our phone. They took our food and then came back later and offered to sell it back to us,” Omar said, referring to the Belarusian officers. “We didn’t even have enough money to buy it back.”

Thousands of Iraqis, many of them Kurds, have been caught up in a new migrant crisis in Europe. EU officials accuse Belarus of precipitating the crisis by loosening its visa rules and encouraging desperate asylum seekers to go to the borders of the EU, then pushing them across in an attempt to punish the bloc for imposing sanctions on Alexander Lukashenko, the autocratic Belarusian president.

Lukashenko, who has led the country for three decades, threatened the EU in May to “flood” its member states with migrants after it imposed sanctions on him following the forced downing of a plane carrying a Belarusian dissident.

Once they reached Belarus, many of the migrants became stranded in the forests of the region without food, water or shelter from the cold. At times, they were thrust into dangerous confrontations as they tried to make it into Poland, Lithuania or Latvia, all members of the EU.

In Iraq, the transportation ministry said it had repatriated 608 people on two flights Friday and has now brought back a total of 1,038 Iraqis from the Belarusian capital, Minsk, after an initial evacuation f light Nov. 18.

Up to 15,000 migrants remain in Belarus, the European Commission estimated Tuesday, with about 2,000 near the EU’S borders, adjacent to Poland, Latvia and Lithuania.