Nineteen Migrants Drown Off Turkish Coast

The Greek coastguard said yesterday that a small plastic boat carrying migrants from Turkey sank off the small island of Farmakonissi, drowning at least 13, mostly children.

Fifteen were rescued and taken to hospital on the nearby island of Leros, and a search is under way for one missing person.

Over a million of those refugees sought asylum in Europe, the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported Monday.

“Out of a total of 1,005,504 arrivals to Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, Malta and Cyprus by December 21, the vast majority of 816,752, arrived by sea in Greece, ” he said.

Eighteen people drowned off Turkey overnight on Friday to Saturday when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea as it was heading for the Greek island of Kalymnos.

In 2014, the number of migrants entering Europe by crossing the Mediterranean was 219,000 according to the United Nations.

The top five nationalities arriving in Greece were from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Albania.

“The number of people displaced by war and conflict is the highest seen in Western and Central Europe since the 1990s”, the UNHCR said, referring to the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia that decade.

The IOM says 3,695 migrants have drowned this year or remain missing.

The latest on the continuing flow of refugees and other migrants into Europe.

The world is witnessing the worst refugee crisis since the horrors of World War II.

“The refugee issue is not a matter of political bribery”, a Turkish government official said, adding that no other country was as experienced as Turkey in meeting refugee demands.

The migrant crisis has led some European states to put up fences and introduce border controls despite the EU’s border-free Schengen area. So far less than 100 refugees have left Greece as part of the program, while the goal set is 66,000 transfers in three years. Lebanon has one million Syrian refugees itself, Jordan 600,000.

William Lacy Swing, IOM’s director general said that the Mediterranean Sea is “the deadliest route for migrants on our planet”.