Croatia said Friday they are closing their borders to migrants after a wave of people overwhelmed their border personnel.
Croatian officials said all migrants will be forced to move through the nation to other countries and will not be allowed to remain on Croatian soil. The government said they will provide food and water to those who arrive but then immediately will make them leave.
“We cannot register and accommodate these people any longer,” Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic told a news conference. “They will get food, water and medical help, and then they can move on. The European Union must know that Croatia will not become a migrant ‘hotspot’. We have hearts, but we also have heads.”
Over 11,000 migrants flooded into the country since Hungary closed their border with Serbia on Wednesday.
Many of the migrants are telling western media they have no choice but to continue.
“Returning back to our country is impossible, because we have no financial means or the moral strength to go back home,” Abu Mohamed who fled Idlib in Syria, told The Associated Press.
“We are coming with our modest Islamic perspectives,” he added. “Terrorism remains back home, terrorism is not coming with us. We were the victims and oppressed back home in our societies.”
The White House has announced that President Obama is instructing his administration to clear the way for 10,000 Syrian refugees to enter the U.S. during the next fiscal year.
The plan was met with immediate criticism from both sides of the political spectrum over security concerns. The 10,000 would mark a significant increase over the nearly 1,300 that will enter the country this fiscal year. Less than 1,500 Syrian refugees have entered the U.S. since the start of the Syrian Civil War in 2011.
“Our enemy now is Islamic terrorism, and these people are coming from a country filled with Islamic terrorists,” said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York. “We don’t want another Boston Marathon bombing situation.”
State Department spokesman John Kirby admitted there was a “significant national security concern” related to the President’s demand.
“I’m not arguing that we’re going to cut corners here,” Kirby said. “But the president has laid out his decision and the target he wants to achieve for the next fiscal year with respect to Syrian refugees, and we’re going to work very hard to do that.”
White House spokesman Josh Earnest tried to lay out the case that no corners would be cut.
“Refugees go through the most robust security process of anybody who’s contemplating travel to the United States,” Earnest said. “Refugees have to be screened by the National Counter Terrorism Center, by the F.B.I. Terrorist Screening Center. They go through databases that are maintained by D.H.S., the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. There is biographical and biometric information that is collected about these individuals.”
More than 4 million Syrians have fled that nation since the beginning of their civil war.
The United Nations has told member nations of the European Union (EU) that they must accept 200,000 migrants in a “common strategy” rather than their current “piecemeal” approach.
The head of the UN’s refugee agency said that the EU is reaching a “defining moment.”
Antonio Guterres said that the EU leadership must demand “mandatory participation” of any country in the EU.
Germany has been taking in the majority of the migrants but is starting to limit migrant access because of the mass influx.
“Germany is doing what is morally and legally required of us, no more and no less,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday. “That’s why this problem concerns all of us in Europe.”
British Prime Minister David Cameron said that because “Britain is a moral nation” they will fulfill their responsibilities.
Germany and France have sent a proposal to all EU nations with suggested amounts of migrants for each country but has found backlash from the smaller nations. CNN reported over 350,000 migrants have come into Europe this year, a level not seen since World War II. Over 3,600 people have died trying to make the journey.
The leader of Hungary, which has been struggling with an influx of thousands of refugees from the Middle East, says the problem is a “German problem” because that’s the destination for most of the immigrants.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban added, however, that he would not allow migrants to leave his country without registering.
“Nobody would like to stay in Hungary, neither in Slovakia nor Poland nor Estonia,” Orban said. “All of them would like to go to Germany. Our job is only to register them.”
The comments from the country’s leader comes as the country’s train station in the capital city of Budapest was reopened to migrants. However, the trains that migrants board only travels to a registration center and not to Germany or other European Union (EU) nations.
Many of the migrants are resisting efforts to leave the trains at the registration center in Bicske and are having to be removed by police.
German officials have previously stated they expect to take in over 800,000 migrants this year, four times the number from last year. However, they are calling for “fair” distribution of the current migrant influx to all EU nations.
Emergency meetings to discuss the situation between EU leaders is scheduled for mid-month.
Migrants flooding into Hungary have begun rioting over the government’s decision to close a train station in Budapest, keeping them from streaming into Germany.
Police erected a blockage at the city’s main train terminal as about 1,000 migrants chanted “Germany! Germany!” Later the protesters sat down in front of the barricaded entrance.
Government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs told the BBC that the country was enforcing the EU’s immigration laws.
The EU has a rule called the “Dublin Regulation” which requires all refugees to register for asylum in the first EU nation they enter. Because Italy and Greece are overwhelmed with hundreds of thousands of migrants, many skip those checkpoints and travel to other EU nations.
“Dublin rules are still valid and we expect European member states to stick to them,” a German interior ministry spokesman said.
EU leaders have already approved measures to help Greece and Italy with registration of migrants and are looking at ways to streamline the process of immigrants coming to other EU countries.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Icelandic residents have called on their government to welcome refugees into their country as way to escape the violence of the Middle East.
Hungarian officials are rushing military troops to their border to try and stop a massive wave of migrants attempting to escape the violence of the Middle East and Asia.
Hungarian officials said that a record 2,533 migrants were arrested attempting to enter the country on Tuesday. Most of them were from Syria, Pakistan or Afghanistan.
Officials are calling the situation the worst migrant crisis since the second World War and Hungary is attempting to quickly build a 110 mile border fence with razor wire to stop the illegal immigration.
“Hungary’s government and national security cabinet … has discussed the question of how the army could be used to help protect Hungary’s border and the EU’s border,” government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs told reporters.
The move by Hungary is coming under criticism from Germany and France. The German and French governments are working to put together a comprehensive plan for all nations across Europe to accept migrants, but Hungary’s actions are countering the proposed actions.
Other nations are also overwhelmed. Greece, which is in the midst of financial crisis unlike any other in the nation’s history, has been burdened with 50,000 migrants in just the month of July.
As a wave of Syrian refugees attempting to escape the violence of the Middle East drew closer to the Hungarian border, Germany announced they would be welcoming in anyone escaping the civil war.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the situation the biggest migration crisis since World War II.
The announcement comes as some smaller nations have declared states of emergency because of the mass wave of people fleeing ISIS and the Syrian war. Macedonia first tried to use their military to keep out the migrants and when they were overrunning chartered trains to take the migrants directly to Germany or France.
German and French officials are working together to create a joint plan for all of Europe to deal with migrants from war torn areas. The outline will provide expedited asylum for those refugees as well as returning to home countries those who are not arriving from an area of conflict.
“There are moments in European history when we face exceptional circumstances, and these are exceptional circumstances that will last,” Hollande said alongside Merkel before they met for talks in Berlin. “So rather than wait and then cope on a day-to-day basis, we must get organized and strengthen our policies.”
Germany announced they expect to absorb 800,000 migrants this year, after only receiving 44,417 in the first six months of the year.
Officials are dealing with a wave of anti-immigrant violence. A shelter for migrants in the German town of Heidenau was attacked three consecutive nights despite police guarding the facility.
The Belgian government has carried out a secret operation to rescue 240 people, over 200 of them Christians, from the Syrian city of Aleppo.
The Christians will be taken to Belgium and offered asylum by the Belgian government.
The secret two-month operation is still being mostly shrouded in secrecy by the Belgian government, likely to keep sources protected from Islamic extremists in the region.
“We did it via civil society organizations which could get them out of there,” said a foreign ministry spokesperson.
“The minority Christians were selected by a citizen ‘action committee’ run by a Belgian diplomat and a psychiatrist with a network of contacts in the country,” AFP news agency wrote. “They left Aleppo in small groups and in seven phases.”
Belgium has taken in about 5,500 refugees from Syria since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011.
“This is the biggest refugee population from a single conflict in a generation,” UN refugee chief Antonio Guterres said in a statement. “It is a population that needs the support of the world but is instead living in dire conditions and sinking deeper into poverty.”
Islamic terrorist group ISIS swooped in on Eritrean refugees in Libya, kidnapping anyone who said they were not a Muslim.
The Commission on Eritrean Refugees reported the attack Sunday.
“IS militants asked everyone who is Muslim or not and everybody started saying they are Muslims,” Meron Estefanos, the co-founder of the International Commission on Eritrean Refugees, told the International Business Times.
The terrorists then began quizzing those who claimed to be Muslims on the Koran and took those who could not answer the questions.
The kidnappings came just two days after two Eritrean refugees were shot dead during a similar attack by ISIS.
Eritrean refugees are fleeing their country’s political oppression. They risk passing through ISIS controlled areas of Libya to obtain a boat ride to Italy and freedom.
The refugees are tracing similar paths to Ethiopian refugees, just like the 28 Ethiopian Christians who were slaughtered by ISIS in April in their quest for freedom.
CER said that many Eritrean refugees are now trying to avoid Libya because of the terrorists.
Yazidi refugees are beginning to speak out about the horrific treatment they experienced at the hands of terrorist group ISIS.
“My older brother, my father, my mother, my wife and even my two kids were killed. All I have left of them is just one picture on my mobile phone,” a man identified as Tahysn to the London Daily Mail. He said that his sons were three and four when ISIS slit their throats.
Other refugees described watching other die from thirst and heat as they were trapped on a mountain awaiting help from western military groups.
“When we left Sinjar, the kids suffered a lot… Many men from our village died, many women have been captured. I saw some kids dying because of the heat,” a woman named Rezal said. “[ISIS]… even cut the throats of the babies.”
The refugees said that many of their kidnapped relatives have been trying to starve themselves to death because of the extreme brutality of their captors.
