Greece charters ferry to house Syrian refugees in port

Authorities have begun loading some 2,500 refugees aboard the 176-meter Eleftherios Venizelos passenger ship to give relief to the island of Kos. The influx of war refugees has overwhelmed the touristic island.

Deutsche Welle, 17 Aug 2015

Hundreds of Syrian refugees boarded the 580-foot chartered ship late Sunday to be housed, fed and processed as Greek authorities receive thousands of new arrivals and relieve overwhelmed officials on the island.

Several thousand migrants are staying in island hotels if they can afford it; many more sleep in tents, abandoned structures or in the open.

Requested by local authorities, the passenger ferry docked Friday and is expected to remain for about two weeks, government officials said.

Officials on board will register Syrians who are already on the island, as well as any new arrivals, according to UN refugee agency spokeswoman Stella Nanou.

Arrivals cross from Turkey

A Syrian migrant holds her children as they
 arrive on an overcrowded dinghy on a
beach near the port on the Greek island
of Kos.

Most of the migrants have crossed the sea from neighboring Turkey and are fleeing the unremitting bloodshed in Syria's civil war, now in its fifth year.

Migrants say they are intent on reaching Athens and points west in Europe to look for work and join friends and relatives who are already established.

"We hope the procedure will be smoother now. We just want to be registered so we can leave to Athens," Muhammad, a refugee from Syria's divided city of Aleppo, told the AFP news agency; he declined give his family name.

Nearly 250,000 refugees have crossed the Mediterranean to Europe this year, according to the International Organization for Migration. About half have come to the Greek islands – due to proximity from Turkey – and numbers are surging in the hot summer weather when calmer winds makes sea crossings safer.

Non-Syrians already on the island must register with police officials, UNHCR's Nanou said. And in a sign of rising tension between migrant groups, some 20 Iraqis at the entrance to the harbor protested, demanding to be allowed onto the ship for faster processing.

Meanwhile, in Athens, the government has transferred hundreds of migrants who were living in a tent city to a newly built reception center in the neighborhood of Eleonas, west of the capital.

jar/bw (Reuters, AFP)