Tag Archives: Migrant Crisis

Pope Francis urges Europe to ‘open hearts and doors’ to suffering migrants

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis appealed to nations on Wednesday to “open their hearts and open their doors” to migrants, saying those waiting at closed European borders in the cold and rain were made to feel like exiles abandoned by God.

Over 1.1 million migrants fleeing war and failed states flowed into the European Union in 2015 and the influx has continued, prompting countries straddling the main migration corridor through the Balkans to the wealthy north of the EU to seal their borders, trapping tens of thousands in Greece.

“How many of our brothers these days are living through a real and dramatic situation of exile, far from their homelands. In their eyes they still have the ruins of their homes,” Pope Francis told tens of thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square.

“They have fear in their hearts and unfortunately, often, the pain of having lost loved their ones,” Francis, who has made defense of migrants a major plank of his three-year-old papacy, said in mostly improvised remarks.

Macedonia trucked 1,500 migrants back to Greece after they forced their way across the border this week. Images of exhausted migrants fording a fast-moving stream in the cold were splashed across Italian newspapers this week.

“Immigrants today are suffering outdoors, without food, and cannot get in. They don’t feel welcome,” Pope Francis said, praising “nations and leaders who open their hearts and open their doors.

“How is it possible that so much suffering can befall innocent men, women and children? … They are there at the border because so many doors and so many hearts are closed.”

The two small parishes inside the Vatican walls are each hosting a family of refugees, one of them Syrian.

EU efforts to seal a deal with Turkey to halt the migrant tide from that country into Europe in return for political and economic rewards stumbled on Tuesday when EU member Cyprus vowed to block it unless Ankara recognized its nationhood.

(Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

‘It felt like a death machine,’ says migrant forced back to Greece

IDOMENI, Greece (Reuters) – It took Hassan Omar four long hours to cross into Macedonia, his wheelchair pushed by strangers across the muddy paths of Greece’s border – but a day later he found himself back at the squalid migrant camp he had left.

Like scores of people, many from war zones in Syria and Iraq, who streamed out of the camp near the Greek town of Idomeni on Monday and crossed into Macedonia, he was rounded up and sent back.

“We were surprised to see the army there,” said Omar, who fled fighting in Iraq, recounting how one man carried him for hours during their 8 km (5-mile) trek, up mountains and through valleys.

“They were very harsh with us. It felt like a death machine, not humans dealing with us,” he said.

An estimated 1,500 people left the camp on Monday trying to find a way past the razor-wire fence erected by Macedonia, on a route they hoped would take them to Germany and other wealthy European Union countries.

Most were picked up by Macedonian security forces, put into trucks and driven back over the border late on Monday or overnight, a Macedonian police official said.

The Macedonian action was part of a drive by Western Balkans states to shut down a migration route from Greece to Germany used by nearly a million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Asia over the last year in Europe’s biggest refugee influx since World War Two.

Greek authorities said they could not confirm the return as there had been no official contact from the Macedonian side, but those who arrived back at the camp recounted their experiences on Tuesday.

One man from the northern Syrian province of Raqqa, who gave his name as Abdo, said Macedonian authorities divided the detainees into groups of 25 to 50 people, put them in cars and dropped them off at the border.

“They told us to run, so we started to run,” he said.

CHILDREN

Authorities estimate at least 12,000 people, including thousands of children, have been stranded in the Idomeni camp, where sanitary conditions have deteriorated after days of heavy rain. Concern about the spread of infection grew after one person was diagnosed with Hepatitis A.

It was unclear why so many people made for the border on Monday, but Greek officials say leaflets that circulated at the Idomeni camp before the march showed it was a planned action.

Sixty-year-old Syrian Mohammad Kattan, who hoped to be reunited with his family in Serbia, said it had taken him six hours to trudge to the border.

“At my age it was very difficult,” he said, bundled up in a thick blanket. “My hope was to get to Macedonia … so that I could continue on to another country.”

Downcast and exhausted, he returned along with a second group of migrants, numbering about 600, who were prevented from even crossing the border by Macedonian security forces.

They waded back knee-deep through the icy river near the border on Tuesday, some barefoot, others weighed down by children and their worldly belongings on their shoulders.

On the riverbank, men and women stood around a fire drying their feet and clothes. One woman sobbed, her face framed by a pink headscarf. Others dragged their belongings across the dirt, and pulled along their children in fruit baskets.

A Syrian woman who gave her name as Nasreem described how she sheltered her children overnight with plastic bags and said she believed they would finally be “done with all the rain and the cold” when they arrived at the border.

“But they didn’t let us through.”

(Writing by Karolina Tagaris; Editing by Pravin Char)

Migrants return to Greek camp after Macedonia sends them back

IDOMENI, Greece (Reuters) – Hundreds of dejected migrants returned to a transit camp in northern Greece on Tuesday after Macedonian authorities blocked their attempt to cross the border or drove those who did get across back to Greece.

Around 2,000 migrants marched out of the Idomeni camp on Monday, hiking into the mountains and fording a river in what Greek authorities said was a well-planned attempt to find a way around a barbed wire fence built by Macedonia to keep them out.

Three migrants drowned on Monday trying to cross a river into Macedonia, one stage on a route that the migrants hoped would take them to Germany and other wealthy European Union countries.

Macedonia loaded about 1,500 migrants and refugees who had succeeded in crossing the border onto trucks and drove them back to Greece, Macedonian police said. Reporters and aid officials said the migrants were left at the Greek border.

Hundreds more migrants were prevented from crossing the border on Monday. Many of them streamed back to Idomeni on Tuesday after spending the night in the mountains.

Migrants carried children across a fast-flowing river before trudging back along muddy paths. One small child was dragged along on a blue plastic container attached to a rope.

“It’s a long way from the camp to the mountains, it took me six hours of walking. At my age it was very difficult,” said one of those returning, 60-year-old Mohammad Kattan.

Back in Idomeni, the camp was crowded, muddy and wet. People started fires to dry their clothes and to warm up. Several hundred migrants found shelter in a deserted farm in the area.

Greek officials said they could not confirm that Macedonia had sent back the migrants.

“No one has been returned from our official border crossings, and no request has been submitted by Skopje (the Macedonian capital),” said George Kyritsis, a spokesman for Greece’s migration coordination center:

Ties between the two neighbors are fraught because of Greece’s long-standing refusal to recognize Macedonia’s name, which is the same as that of a northern Greek province.

At least 12,000 people, including thousands of children, have been stranded in the Idomeni camp, their path to the EU blocked after Balkan nations closed their borders.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said on Tuesday there was “no chance” that borders which had been shut down throughout the Balkans would be re-opened. He urged refugees to move to reception centers set up by the state.

European Union leaders, trying to stem a flow of migrants and refugees fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and beyond, are due to hold a new summit with Turkey this week to seal an agreement intended to halt the exodus.

Jan van’t Land, an official with medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres at Idomeni, said around 400 migrants had returned to the camp.

“There are still many hundreds of people on both the Greek and the Macedonian side of the border,” he told Reuters.

EU Migration Commission Dimitris Avramopoulos, on a visit to Idomeni, urged EU countries to put into action immediately a long-stalled plan to re-house asylum seekers from Greece elsewhere in the bloc.

“Our aim is within the next two weeks to reach the level of 6,000 to be relocated every week,” he told reporters. “All our values are in danger today and you can see it here in Idomeni. I believe that building fences, deploying barbed wire, is not a solution.”

Conditions at the Idomeni camp have deteriorated after days of heavy rain. Concern about the spread of infection grew after one person was diagnosed with Hepatitis A.

(Additional reporting by Kole Casule in Skopje, Ivana Sekularac in Belgrade, Renee Maltezou and Karolina Tagaris in Athens, writing by Adrian Croft, editing by Larry King)

Hundreds of migrants march out of Greek camp, cross to Macedonia

MOIN, Macedonia (Reuters) – Hundreds of migrants marched out of a Greek transit camp, hiked for hours along muddy paths and forded a rain-swollen river to get around a border fence and cross into Macedonia, where they were detained on Monday, authorities said.

A Macedonian police spokeswoman said the several hundred migrants who had crossed into Macedonia would be sent back to Greece. A Reuters photographer put the number who crossed as high as 2,000.

About 30 journalists, including a Reuters photographer, who followed the migrants were also detained, witnesses said.

Earlier, Macedonian police said three migrants – two men and a woman – had drowned crossing a river near the Greek border that had been swollen by heavy rain.

The crossing put the migrant issue back in the spotlight days before leaders from the European Union and Turkey are due to meet again to seal an agreement intended to keep migrants in Turkey from moving to Europe through Greece.

At least 12,000 people, including thousands of children, have been stranded in a sprawling tent city in northern Greece, their path to the EU blocked after Macedonia and other nations along the so-called Western Balkan route closed their borders.

On Monday, more than 1,000 migrants streamed out of the camp, searching for a way around the twin border fences Macedonia built to keep them out. A second group of migrants, many of them from war zones in Syria and Iraq, later followed them.

Heading west along muddy paths, the migrants, wrapped in coats and hats, carried their belongings in rucksacks and bags. Many were children, some walking, others riding in strollers. Some made victory signs as they walked.

When they reached a river, the migrants stretched a rope across it and formed a human chain to cross. They carried children across on their shoulders.

Once over the river, the migrants walked along the border fence until they found the point where it ended in mountainous country. But after they crossed the border, Macedonian soldiers rounded them up and put the migrants in army trucks.

“We are taking measures to return the group to Greece,” the Macedonian police spokeswoman said.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said Hungary was the EU country that had sent most police officers to help non-EU member Macedonia protect its border with Greece.

“Macedonia needs and deserves help and assistance from the European Union because actually they’ve been protecting the southern border of the European Union,” he told reporters in Brussels.

Petros Tanos, a police spokesman in northern Greece, said police were investigating media reports that leaflets had circulated in the Idomeni camp urging migrants to march on Monday.

“We do not know who produced it…nor how they found the ropes yet,” he told Reuters, referring to ropes used to cross the river.

Babar Baloch, regional spokesman for U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, said conditions in the Idomeni camp were difficult after days of heavy rain.

“This is not a proper camp. People are exhausted, tired and running out of patience,” he said.

A Serbian customs spokeswoman said 33 migrants trying to cross into Serbia from Macedonia had been found in an empty cargo train in Presevo, southern Serbia, on Saturday and had been handed over to police.

The group, aged between 18 and 26, were mainly Afghans, but also included Syrians and Libyans. All but one were men. More than a million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and beyond have flooded into the EU since early 2015.

In Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday there was no question Germany has benefited from the closure of the Balkan migrant route. A day earlier, voters in three regional elections had punished her conservatives and flocked to a new anti-immigration party that wants German borders closed.

But Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said it was time to say enough to the selfishness of countries that thought raising a wall was a lasting response to the migrant challenge. “How long do you think a wall might last in the internet age?” Renzi told students in Rome.

(Additional reporting by Branko Filipovic, Ivana Sekularac, Lefteris Karagiannopoulos in Athens, Alexandros Avramidis in Idomeni, Steve Scherer in Rome, Tina Bellon in Berlin, Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels; Writing by Adrian Croft; Editing by Larry King)

Syrian war creates child refugees and child soldiers, report shows

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syria’s five-year-old conflict has created 2.4 million child refugees, killed many and led to the recruitment of children as fighters, some as young as seven, U.N. children’s fund UNICEF said on Monday.

Its report “No Place for Children” said more than 8 million children in Syria and neighboring countries needed humanitarian assistance, with the international response plan for Syria chronically underfunded.

“Twice as many people now live under siege or in hard-to-reach areas compared with 2013. At least two million of those cut off from assistance are children, including more than 200,000 in areas under siege,” it said.

The U.N. says more than 450,000 people are under siege. Cases of starvation have been reported this year in areas surrounded by government forces and their allies near Damascus, and by Islamic State in eastern Syria.

Violence continues despite a fragile cessation of hostilities reached last month.

UNICEF said 400 children were killed in 2015. A separate report on Friday by a number of aid groups, including Oxfam, said U.N. figures showed at least 50,000 people had been killed since April 2014.

CHILD SOLDIERS, NO SCHOOL

“A trend of particular concern is the increase in child recruitment,” UNICEF said.

“Children report being actively encouraged to join the war by parties to the conflict offering gifts and ‘salaries’ of up to $400 a month.”

Since 2014, warring sides have recruited younger children, it said, some as young as seven. More than half of children recruited in cases UNICEF verified in 2015 were under 15.

Children have been filmed executing prisoners in grisly propaganda videos by the Islamic State group.

Outside Syria, 306,000 Syrian children have been born as refugees, it said. U.N. refugee agency UNHCR says nearly 70,000 Syrian refugee children have been born in Lebanon alone.

UNICEF said 3.7 million children had been born since the conflict began, a third of all Syrian children.

Some 2.8 million Syrian children in Syria or neighboring countries are not attending school. Dozens of schools and hospitals were attacked in 2015, according to aid groups.

“Half of all medical staff have fled Syria and only one third of hospitals are functional. Each doctor used to look after the needs of around 600 people – now it’s up to 4,000,” UNICEF said.

Syria’s neighbors host the vast majority of its 4.8 million refugees. Europe hosts an eighth of the number residing in those countries, it said.

The separate joint aid agency report, “Fuelling the fire”, criticized world powers including Russia, Britain, the United States, France, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Iran, which had “intensified their military engagement in Syria”.

“To varying degrees, these states – which should play a key role in ending the suffering in Syria – are actively contributing to that very suffering,” it said.

U.N.-brokered peace talks open on Monday in Geneva to seek an end to a conflict that has killed more than 250,000 people.

(Reporting by John Davison; Editing by Andrew Roche and Toby Chopra)

Greece struggles to convince stranded migrants that Balkan route is shut

ATHENS/IDOMENI, Greece (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of refugees and migrants were stuck in camps and ports across Greece on Friday as authorities struggled to convince them that the main passage to reach wealthy northern Europe has shut.

By early morning hundreds more people, many from the Middle East and Africa, had reached Greek islands, days after the shutdowns along the “Balkan route” were imposed.

Their arrival helped swell the number of those stuck across the country to over 42,000. At a sprawling, muddy tent city near the northern border town of Idomeni, 12,000 people, among them thousands of children and babies, waited to cross to Macedonia.

“These people maintain the hope that a number of them will cross to the north,” Citizen Protection Minister Nikos Toskas told Greek TV. “We’re trying to convince them … that the Balkan route has closed.”

Further south, more than 3,500 people waited at the main port of Piraeus near Athens after having arrived on ships from the eastern Aegean islands.

“At Piraeus we spent five hours trying to get people on buses and take them to a camp, but they didn’t want to board,” Toskas said. “They think that once you reach Idomeni, you cross to central Europe.”

Scuffles have broken out at Idomeni this week as destitute migrants and refugees scrambled for food and firewood. Tensions flared briefly on Friday and at least one man was injured, with blood streaming down his face, during a handout of supplies.

Many have slept in the open, often in the rain and low temperatures.

“In Syria we are fighting ISIS (Islamic State militants), now we are fighting nature and I think its worse,” said Ali, a Syrian refugee from Aleppo who has been in Greece for 20 days. “ISIS have a limit but nature (has) no limit,” he told Reuters.

EU READY TO HELP

Greece has been the main entry point into Europe for more than a million refuges and migrants since last year. More than 130,000 people have arrived this year alone, stretching the country’s limited resources.

So far, Greece has the capacity to host 30,000 people at camps and centers across the country and aims to raise that to 50,000 by next week, Deputy Defense Minister Dimitris Vitsas said.

“We need to convince these people, in every possible, non-violent way, that there are shelters in mainland Greece to host them,” he told Greek radio.

The EU launched a new aid program last week worth an initial 700 million euros. Greece, its economy blighted by the euro zone debt crisis, was expected to be the main beneficiary of the scheme.

During a visit to Athens on Friday, the EU’s commissioner for humanitarian aid, Christos Stylianides, reiterated the EU’s support and said the bloc stood ready to help Greece with further funds.

“We have a moral duty as Europeans to offer this help to refugees,” Stylianides told reporters after meeting Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, adding other European funds were available besides humanitarian help.

Macedonia, which erected a razor wire fence at its border with Greece, criticized Greece on Friday for doing too little despite the support it has received.

“The get all they want. The only problem is they’re doing nothing with it,” Macedonian President Gjorge Ivanov was quoted as telling German daily Bild.

(Additional reporting by Renee Maltezou and Lefteris Karagiannopoulos in Athens, Michael Nienaber in Berlin and Stoyan Nenov in Idomeni; Writing by Karolina Tagaris)

Turkey promises legal compliance in implementing EU migrant deal

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey is working on measures to fulfill its part in a potential $6.7 billion deal to take back illegal migrants from Europe and will involve the U.N. to ensure it complies with international law, senior Turkish officials said on Friday.

Ankara struck a draft deal with the European Union on Monday in which it agreed to take back irregular migrants in exchange for more funding, the quick introduction of visa-free travel for Turks, and a speeding up of long-stalled EU membership talks.

European and Turkish leaders hope the deal will discourage illegal migrants and kill off the business of human smugglers.

But legal details are still being worked out ahead of an EU summit next week and many governments remain skeptical. The top U.N. human rights official said on Thursday it could mean illegal “collective and arbitrary expulsions”.

A senior Turkish government official involved in the negotiations said Turkey would comply with international law and that the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR would be involved.

“UNHCR will certainly not be excluded on any work conducted between Turkey and the EU. UNHCR will take part in the execution and the implementation,” he said, declining to be identified because the agreement has not yet been finalised.

A particular difficulty for EU lawyers trying to tie up the package by the March 17-18 summit is the question of whether Turkey constitutes a “safe” country for the return of illegal migrants.

An EU definition of such a state refers to the Geneva Convention on refugees, with which Turkey does not fully comply.

“Many say that Turkey is not a safe third country. That subject is one that needs more work and discussion,” said Metin Corabatir, a former UNHCR spokesman who now heads the Research Centre on Asylum and Migration, a Turkish think-tank.

Turkey is nonetheless planning rapid legislation to try to ensure the deal can be implemented. It has already offered to sign readmission agreements with 14 countries including Afghanistan, a move which would enable it to more quickly take back migrants rejected by the EU.

It is also working on the conditions set by EU leaders for the granting of visa-free travel by June, seen by many Turks as the most tangible benefit they will get from the deal.

Turkey aims to complete nine steps by May 1 including a new personal data security law, a framework for the introduction of biometric passports and tighter regulation of its border security agency, the senior official said.

(Additional reporting by Tulay Karadeniz; Writing by Nick Tattersall)

Europe’s deal with Turkey fails to deter migrant attempts for now

DIDIM, Turkey (Reuters) – Turkey’s coastguard intercepted dozens of mostly Syrian migrants in coves along the Aegean coast on Wednesday as they continued to attempt perilous sea crossings to Greece despite Ankara’s efforts to stem the flow under a deal with the European Union.

A group of 42 people, more than a dozen of them children, sat inside a coastguard compound, some lying under blankets, in the seaside resort of Didim after being detained. Scores more waited among boulders by the beach, watched by armed police, as a bus came to take them away.

“We’re afraid of staying here and afraid of staying in Syria … We’re fleeing to the country that will take us. We want safety, someone to care for us,” said Sameeha Abdullah, one of the group near the beach, who fled Syria’s civil war.

Just offshore, a coastguard boat approached what appeared to be a small vessel carrying more migrants. Some officials fear a scramble to cross to the nearby Greek islands, despite increased NATO-backed sea patrols in the Aegean, before the tentative agreement with the EU comes into full force.

Under the draft deal struck on Monday, Turkey agreed to take back all irregular migrants in exchange for more funding, an earlier introduction of visa-free travel to Europe for Turks, and a speeding up of Ankara’s long-stalled EU membership talks.

The aim, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and EU leaders have said, is to discourage illegal migrants and break the business model of human smugglers who have fueled Europe’s largest migration crisis since World War Two. The message, they say, is simple: try to cross illegally and get sent straight back.

But in a shabby sea-front hotel in Didim, off whose coast 25 migrants drowned on Sunday when their boat capsized, few had heard of the deal. A group of migrants from the Iraqi city of Mosul, stuck because they could not afford to pay the smugglers, said they were still determined to leave.

“Even if they catch me, what am I going to do here? I may as well die trying,” said Hussein, 45, who said his three sons were killed by Islamic State militants in Iraq.

The hotelier, who gave his name as Enes, said a group of 20 Syrians, whom he collectively charged 500 lira ($170) for the night, had left yesterday for Europe. But he was sure more would come.

“Even if Europe gave Turkey hundreds of billions for refugees, Syrians still wouldn’t stay. Most of their family is there so they’re joining them,” he said.

LEGALITY QUESTIONED

Turkey has no intention of sending refugees back to conflict zones and sees no legal hurdles to implementing the deal, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Wednesday, after meetings with Belgian officials in Ankara.

EU and Turkish officials are scrambling to finalize the deal before their next summit on March 17-18, and Cavusoglu said the bloc had largely accepted Turkey’s terms.

But the United Nations and human rights groups have warned that blanket returns without considering individual asylum cases could be illegal. And it remains far from clear that the message will get through to desperate families who see smuggling as their surest route into Europe as its borders close.

Even as groups of migrants were detained on the beaches, more arrived by taxi in Didim, a popular holiday resort with yachts bobbing in its marina. Some carried bags, children in tow, and headed for the town’s small hotels, which like in other parts of the Aegean coast, have been profiting from migrant business in the tourism low season.

“The markets, the hotels, the restaurants – everyone was smiling. Because of the refugees we eat bread,” said the manager of one hostel. The hostel is in Basmane, a run-down neighborhood of Izmir, the main city on the Turkish Aegean coast and long a stopover for migrants trying to reach Europe during the Iraq wars and Arab Spring uprisings.

NEW GROUPS ARRIVING

More than a million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and beyond have flooded into the EU since early 2015, most crossing the Aegean from Turkey to Greece in small boats, then heading north through the Balkans to Germany.

Border shutdowns further north have blocked the ‘Balkans corridor’, leaving tens of thousands of migrants trapped in Greece. Macedonia has closed its border to illegal migrants after Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia announced tight new restrictions on migrant entry.

Rights group Amnesty International called the proposed mass return of migrants under the EU deal with Turkey a “death blow to the right to seek asylum”. Relief charity Doctors without Borders said it was cynical and inhumane.

But Davutoglu insisted the preliminary deal would not stop Syrian refugees legitimately seeking shelter in Europe. He and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras signed an amendment to the countries’ readmission agreement late on Tuesday to make returning third country nationals easier.

“The aim here is to discourage irregular migration and … to recognize those Syrians in our camps who the EU will accept – though we will not force anyone to go against their will – on legal routes,” he said after a meeting with Tsipras in Izmir.

Under the tentative deal with Ankara, the EU would admit one refugee directly from Turkey for each Syrian it took back from the Greek Aegean islands. Those who attempted the sea route illegally would be returned and go to the back of the queue.

With new groups of migrants from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere continuing to arrive along Turkey’s coast in the hope of crossing to Greece, that message appears for now not to be getting through, to the frustration of some local residents.

“Whatever’s necessary should be done. The refugees should be gathered in one spot in my opinion. Everything should be done to ensure everyone’s comfort, peace and welfare,” said Armagan Gulcicek, an Izmir resident in a street full of cafes and stores popular with migrants, some of them selling life jackets.

“Let’s put an end to this nonsense.”

(Additional reporting by Umit Bektas and Mehmet Emin Caliskan in Didim, Kole Casule in Skopje; Writing by Nick Tattersall; editing by David Stamp)

Yemen war generates widespread suffering, but few refugees

(Reuters) – Amid Yemen’s misery, two young women living in the war-damaged cities of Aden and Sanaa know they are among the relatively fortunate. They are not starving, their homes have not been destroyed and they have survived bombs and bullets unscathed.

But both long to escape the conflict plunging their country ever deeper into catastrophe. Neither can see a way out.

“I don’t want to lose my life over a dream,” says Nisma al-Ozebi, a 21-year-old civil engineering student in the southern port city of Aden. She hankers for a scholarship that would be her passport to a sanctuary in Europe, but adds: “I don’t want to leave Yemen and live like a refugee.”

Yemen’s civil war intensified sharply almost a year ago when a Saudi-led Arab coalition intervened with air strikes, a naval blockade and ground troops to counter Houthi rebels intent on seizing the whole country.

The Houthis, Zaidi Shi’ite tribesmen now allied with an old enemy, former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, are seen by Riyadh as tools of regional arch-foe Iran, a charge they and Tehran deny.

“You feel like death is waiting in every place,” says Kholood al-Absi, 27, who lost her job with an oil services company in Sanaa late last year. “From the air it’s Saudi planes. From the ground it’s Houthis, car bombs, explosions, clashes. You feel the lives of Yemenis are very cheap.”

Reached by telephone at her home in the capital, she says: “I have a valid passport … I’m just ready to go.”

But she admits it’s a fantasy for now. Her family would never let her travel as a single woman, even if she had enough money to study abroad and seek a new life.

Besides, she can’t imagine crowding into a refugee boat for Djibouti. “It’s very dangerous, so I think it’s better for me to die in my home than to die far away,” she laughs.

MALNOURISHED CHILDREN

About 170,000 people have fled Yemen so far, mostly to Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan. Most of them are not Yemenis, but returning refugees and other foreigners. The United Nations expects another 167,000 departures this year.

Given the immense hardships in Yemen, a greater refugee exodus might have been expected. People fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and beyond have flooded into the EU since early 2015 causing a crisis.

However, penned in by ocean and desert, with only Saudi Arabia and Oman as direct neighbours, Yemenis have no easy outlets – although Riyadh now allows those already in the kingdom to stay. Flights out are irregular at best. Former havens such as Jordan now demand visas and set tough conditions.

Mogib Abdullah, a Yemeni spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, says his countrymen have in the past tended not to migrate for work much further than Saudi Arabia, are culturally reluctant to become refugees, and view getting to Europe as a very difficult option.

“People do not really have the courage or means and resources to do it,” he says. “I think they will just have to live with the realities they have. They are trapped and they will continue to be trapped, until the warring parties acknowledge that Yemenis deserve a better life at peace in their own country.”

The war has inflicted a devastating toll on 26 million Yemenis struggling to survive in an already impoverished country beset by acute water scarcity, poor governance and corruption.

The United Nations estimates conservatively 6,000 people have been killed, about half of them civilians. It says four-fifths of Yemenis need outside aid. More than half have poor food supply and at least 320,000 children under five are severely malnourished. Upwards of 2.4 million have been forcibly displaced.

STOLEN DREAMS

Low living standards and education levels in Yemen mean Nisma and Kholood, with their hopes of visas to study in Europe, are the exception, not the rule. But if the war lasts longer, desperation might yet turn a trickle of refugees into a flood.

“I was ambitious, I liked to dream, I had many plans in my head,” says Kholood of her pre-war life. “But the war has stolen everything from me. I’m just thinking maybe I will die today or tomorrow. I feel like I’m dying but still breathing.”

The country she once knew has unraveled.

“Now there is a big gap between Yemenis. Before, all of us, Sunni and Shi’ite, went to the same mosques, gathered in the same places. This war makes us ask which religion, which party, someone belongs to,” she said.

Evidence of worsening poverty is stark. “A lot of people are just begging for money and food. Some are well-educated people who lost their jobs and couldn’t feed their children. This war has stolen their dignity,” Kholood says. “I feel it’s unbearable for me, but my situation is better than a lot of people.”Kholood said she feels lonely because friends had left Yemen, sad because of relatives who had been killed and lacking purpose without the job she loved.

Now, apart from domestic chores, she spends time on Facebook and watching the news, especially a channel that quickly reports the location of air strikes. “When we hear bombs, we go to this channel to see where they are falling,” she says.

Kholood has no love for the Houthis, but her initial support for the Saudi intervention has soured with the passage of time. “We feel it destroyed Yemen. Saudi Arabia and the other countries supporting it … are just killing people without feeling any guilt. A lot of innocent people have been killed, civilians, children.”

MILITARY STALEMATE

No end to the fighting is in sight. The Saudi-led coalition, mostly comprising Sunni Muslim Arab states, has failed to win a clear victory despite its air power and resources.

The Houthis were pushed out of Aden in July by local Sunni militias backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The main fighting has moved to fiercely contested Taiz and closer to the Houthi-held capital Sanaa in the north.

Yet the battle-hardened Houthis are defiant. Holed up in Aden, Saudi-backed President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi enjoys international recognition, but little popular support, even among his fellow-southerners.

The war has fueled Sunni-Shi’ite animosities, long muted in Yemen, and deepened rifts between the north and the once-independent south, where separatist sentiment runs high.

Among the main beneficiaries of the mayhem are militants of al Qaeda and the newly implanted Islamic State. This unintended, if predictable, consequence of the war worries Saudi Arabia’s main arms suppliers, the United States, Britain and France.

Yet whatever their misgivings, Western powers provide munitions, intelligence, mid-air refueling and other support for the Saudi-led coalition, despite what a U.N. panel describes as its “widespread and systematic attacks on civilian targets”.

Critics in Yemen and elsewhere accuse the United States and its allies of willingness to sacrifice Yemeni civilian lives to safeguard arms deals with Gulf states worth billions of dollars and to placate Saudi anger over a fragile Western detente with Iran, a suggestion Western officials dismiss.

Caught up in the turmoil are millions of Yemenis, among them Kholood and Nisma, who live in daily fear.

With her father and step-mother away in Jordan for medical reasons, Nisma was left in sole charge of her three younger siblings, including her five-year-old brother Mustafa, when fighting erupted near their home in March 2015.

The Houthis and their allies were assaulting the airport in Aden, which Hadi had declared his temporary capital after being driven from Sanaa. Street battles raged for the next four months. Few supplies reached the blockaded city.

“AFGHANISTAN MODEL”

Nisma and her siblings moved twice in search of safety. First, crammed into a neighbor’s car with a family of five, to an aunt’s house after a missile exploded next door. And then a few days later, when rockets and shells pounded their aunt’s district, to their grandmother’s home.

The family, by now reunited, returned home to Aden’s Khormaksar district when fighting abated in July and to their surprise found it undamaged, unlike many others.

Nisma says a degree of normality has returned, with power and water restored. But she has lost any sense of personal security. “I go out of my house every day expecting I will be killed anywhere, at any time, by any guy,” she says.

Frequent assassinations and attacks by Islamist fighters, other factions and criminal gangs in the last six months illustrate new risks in a once-cosmopolitan Arabian Sea port.

“They say they follow Islamic State, but who knows,” Nisma reflects. “If they are bold enough to stop us and tell us to dress as they want, maybe one day they will lock us in our houses. The Afghanistan model is coming here soon.”

This fear drives her determination to escape a country where any hope for a better future has evaporated.

“Everyone is thinking of leaving, but how and where?”

(Reporting by Alistair Lyon, editing by Peter Millership and William Maclean)

U.N., rights groups say EU-Turkey migrant deal may be illegal

GENEVA/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The United Nations and human rights groups warned on Tuesday that a tentative European Union deal to send back all irregular migrants to Turkey in exchange for political and financial rewards could be illegal.

“I am deeply concerned about any arrangement that would involve the blanket return of anyone from one country to another without spelling out the refugee protection safeguards under international law,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

He was speaking hours after the 28 EU leaders sketched an accord with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Brussels that would grant Ankara more money to keep refugees in Turkey, faster visa-free travel for Turks and a speeding up of Ankara’s long-stalled membership talks.

Rights group Amnesty International called the proposed mass return of migrants a “death blow to the right to seek asylum”. Relief charity Doctors without Borders said it was cynical and inhumane.

But the executive European Commission insisted the deal to put an end to a mass influx of more than a million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and beyond, due to be finalised next week, was fully legal.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who pushed for the accord to assuage anxious voters before regional elections on Sunday, said things were finally moving in the right direction after nearly a million Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans and others flooded into Germany alone last year. She denied accusations that Turkey was using refugees to blackmail Europe.

The 28 EU leaders were taken by surprise by the bold, last minute Turkish initiative, which went beyond previous plans for more limited cooperation. Unable to sign up to firm commitments immediately, they agreed to wrap up a deal at their next summit on March 17-18 but several points remain sensitive.

Migrants marooned in squalor on Greece’s frontier with Macedonia by the closure of borders further north vowed to keep trying to cross Europe to wealthy Germany, while Syrian refugees in Turkey said they too would not be deterred by the lockdown.

“We will stay here even if we all die,” said Kadriya Jasem, a 25-year-old from Aleppo in Syria, one of 13,000 people living in a makeshift camp in Idomeni on the Greek side of the border with Macedonia.

ONE-FOR-ONE

Under the tentative deal, the EU would admit one refugee directly from Turkey for each Syrian it took back from the Greek Aegean islands, and those who attempted the perilous sea route would be returned and go to the back of the queue.

The aim is to persuade Syrians and others that they have better prospects if they stay in Turkey, with increased EU funding for housing, schools and subsistence.

EU officials questioned how the one-for-one scheme would work in practice, with several EU countries objecting to any quota system for resettling refugees.

It might also be overwhelmed if the volume of migrants crossing the Aegean remains high despite increased NATO-backed sea patrols by Greece and Turkey.

Brussels sought to dismiss concerns over the legality of the proposed re-admission arrangements.

“You can be sure that the agreement that will come at the end of it will comply with both European and international law,” Commission spokesman Alexander Winterstein told a news briefing.

Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker cited EU asylum procedure rules to argue that member states were entitled to refuse to consider a claim from a person who arrives from a safe third country.

Some Commission officials have private misgivings both about Turkey’s “safe” status, given its human rights record, and the compatibility of mass returns with asylum seekers’ right to an individual assessment of their claim, an EU source said.

It was unclear whether an eventual deal could be challenged in European or international courts. Any case might take years to reach a ruling, with EU doors closed in the meantime.

Migration experts said refugees would likely try other routes if Turkey’s closure worked. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have begun tightening identity controls and erecting fences on their eastern borders, fearing the Baltic region will become a new entry point for migrants.

“MISERABLE”

EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, speaking in the European Parliament, welcomed the preliminary deal and said: “We need now to ensure a quick implementation of the voluntary humanitarian scheme from Turkey and to implement projects that will further improve the situation of the Syrians in Turkey.”

But many lawmakers criticized the strategy to regain control of the influx, saying the EU must ensure people needing international protection are able to claim asylum.

“In the name of ‘realpolitik’, member states seemed ready to trample on their principles to conclude a shameful bargain with Turkey,” the French Socialist group said.

Critics denounced a cascade of border closures down the main Western Balkan migration route that has left 33,000 people stranded in Greece, causing a humanitarian catastrophe.

Avramopolus responded on Twitter: “It is our responsibility to create more legal pathways for people in need of protection to come to Europe legally and safely.

“Let me assure you that @EU_Commission does not forget and does not forsake its humanitarian duties.”

While Poland and others fretted about where the EU would find the money to double the existing 3 billion euros earmarked for Syrian refugees in Turkey, Cyprus dug in its heels on advancing Turkey’s EU accession process.

Nicosia has blocked the opening of five so-called negotiation chapters – vetting Turkish compliance with EU rules – to demand recognition by Ankara and trade access. It says it will not lift objections until Turkey opens its ports and airports to Cypriot-registered traffic.

Turkey has no diplomatic ties with Cyprus, an ethnically divided island which joined the EU split in 2004 and which is represented by the Greek Cypriot government. Ankara maintains ties with a breakaway Turkish Cypriot state in northern Cyprus.

The two Cypriot communities are negotiating a peace deal to overcome 42 years of division, but until there is movement, Nicosia looks set to keep blocking Ankara’s EU progress.

(Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald in Brussels, Lefteris Papadimas in Idomeni, Greece, and Michele Kambas in Nicosia; Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Giles Elgood)