ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Omer Dawood is asking the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to help locate his 15-year-old son who he believes has been detained in Turkey after failing to reach Greece by boat this week.
"My son is 15 years old. We do not know what has happened to him," Dawood told Rudaw on Saturday. "The smugglers have blocked us and they do not speak with us."
Dawood said his son, Pavel, was on board a boat that set off from Turkey for Italy on August 13. After less than 24 hours, the boat broke down and was pushed back to Turkey by the Greek coastguard.
"The smugglers told us that they had been arrested. They did not give us any precise details. My son is young. We cannot contact him since they have confiscated his cellphone,” the distraught father said.
He appealed to the KRG to locate his son and others detained in Turkey and check on their welfare.
"Let them at least reach out to the relevant Turkish sides so they do not mistakenly deport the residents of the Kurdistan Region to the wrong place," he said.
The Turkish coastguard reported rescuing at least 84 people from three separate inflatable boats on August 13 and 14.
Ranj Pishdari, a Europe-based migrant rights activist, told Rudaw that many of the passengers came from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Kurdish regions of western Iran.
"They have all been deported back to Turkey in small boats," Pishdari said, adding that they are now “safe.”
"But Turkey does not have migrant camps, so they have all been jailed," he noted, predicting they will be sent back to Kurdistan within 10 to 20 days.
Officials and civil society groups in the Kurdistan Region have repeatedly warned that there is a growing trend of people risking their lives to migrate to Europe, driven by high unemployment and limited economic opportunities at home.
An increasing number of young people from the Raparin area are choosing the Libya-Italy sea route to reach Europe. This route has become more popular than the Turkey-Greece corridor where there are tighter border controls and longer crossing times.
Six Kurds who had been detained in Libya while trying to reach Europe were returned home on Friday under arrangements made by Iraq’s diplomatic mission in Tripoli and the KRG. Another 37 were repatriated from Tunisia earlier this week.
More than 85,747 people have reached the European Union through irregular migration so far this year, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Of this number, 80,708 have arrived via water routes. During the same time period, 1,212 migrants have either died or gone missing.
