A boat carrying migrants from Turkey to Greece has sunk with the loss of 25 lives, Turkey's coast guard says. Fifteen people were rescued after the boat capsized near the Turkish resort of Didim. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) says at least 321 migrants drowned trying to get to Greece between 1 January and 3 March.Reports suggest Macedonia has set new curbs on Syrian migrants trying to cross the land border from Greece.In another development, Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced that alliance ships would be deployed to Turkish and Greek territorial waters in the battle to defeat people smugglers.
More than 2,000 migrants, most of whom the IOM says are from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, are arriving into Greece from Turkey every day hoping to travel further north through Europe. But some EU countries re-imposed internal border controls and Macedonia sharply reduced the numbers allowed to cross, leading to a build-up on the Greek side of the border. On Sunday, reports from the border said Macedonia had stopped allowing entry to anyone from areas in Iraq and Syria it did not consider to be active conflict zones. As a result, anyone from Damascus or Baghdad is not allowed to pass. Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the UN's refugee agency, called the development "concerning".
On Saturday, Apostolos Tzitzikostas, governor of a northern border region, said the number of migrants on the frontier waiting to cross north into Macedonia had grown to at least 13,000. Mr Tzitzikostas called for a state of emergency to be imposed on the border that could facilitate the delivery of aid. An emergency summit will take place between the EU and Turkey on Monday to try to seek a common approach to handling the flow of arrivals. Last week, European Council President Donald Tusk said he had been told by the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan that his country was ready to take back all migrants apprehended in Turkish waters.
I believe that if the UK has the power to be able to create a vote bombing Syria we should have a vote to save the lives in Syria for the crossing in the boats. Driven to entertain the suspicion that we should value their lives just as much as we value our families lives.
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