Flight back home from Belarus: Many Iraqis want to stay

The Iraqi government is offering the first return flight for migrants on the Belarusian-Polish border from Minsk to Erbil and Baghdad on Thursday. But most of them want to stay despite their difficult situation.

Iraqi Airways’ number one return flight from Minsk to Baghdad with a stopover in Erbil is scheduled to start on Thursday. Then there will probably be people on board who actually wanted to join the European Union and who failed on the border between Belarus and Poland. So far have been after NDR-Information about 200 of them registered for a flight from the Belarusian capital Minsk back to Iraq.

Among them is a young father with two children. He reported to you NDR-Reporter that he tried twice to cross the border. Now he wants to go back to Iraq with his children and calls on his compatriots not to come to Minsk: “There is no hope here,” he said. He himself gave the tugboat almost everything he owned. He doesn’t know how things will go on when he is back in Iraq with his family.

But despite the dramatic situation on the border with Poland, most of them apparently do not want to give up their plan to get into the EU. The Iraqi embassy in Warsaw now assumes 8,000 Iraqis are in Minsk. There are said to be around 3,000 in the border area. Around 1200 Iraqis have made it to Poland and more than twice as many – around 2800 – are currently registered in Lithuania, the Iraqi embassy in Warsaw said NDR with. It is difficult to predict at the moment whether the number of those returning voluntarily to Iraq will rise. The Iraqi government calls on its citizens to do so.

Maas: repatriation to countries of origin

Following a meeting with his EU counterparts on Monday, the German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas spoke out against the migrants stuck in Belarus coming to Germany. Maas pleaded for “a return to their countries of origin”.

However, during talks with representatives of the European Union, the Iraqi Minister for Migration, Ivan Faeq Jabro, rejected a forced return of all Iraqis and stressed that their compatriots had fallen victim to a political conflict between the EU and Belarus.