WARSAW: A four-year-old Iraqi migrant girl went missing in an icy forest after being separated from her parents in a scuffle with Polish border guards, humanitarian groups said as they pressed for access to the border region to help find the child.
Poland has sealed off the region along its frontier with Belarus to outsiders as it has sought to keep out thousands of people from the Middle East and Africa who traveled to Belarus in the hope of crossing into European Union territory.
The EU accuses Belarus of flying them into the country and then pushing them to cross into Poland and — to a lesser extent — Lithuania and Latvia in retaliation for sanctions imposed on Minsk over human rights abuses.
Humanitarian groups reported on Wednesday that the Iraqi girl, called Eileen, was separated from her parents after they breached the border into Poland on Monday night.
They said the parents handed their daughter to another adult migrant when Polish border guards approached and pushed them back into Belarus, and the girl was last seen with the person accompanying her near the Polish frontier village of Nowy Dwor.
“This girl is probably either already dead or will die very soon. The most dramatic thing is that if it was a Polish child, the whole country would be looking for her,” Kasia Kosciesza from the Families without Borders charity group said.
“The search should have started as soon as they knew of the situation...Chances are diminishing, night is setting in again and temperatures will start falling, so if we want to rescue her, it needs to happen immediately.”
Border Guard spokeswoman Anna Michalska said servicemen started searching for the girl as soon as they received information she was missing around midday on Tuesday.
“Extra patrols were directed to the area where the girl was supposed to be. We also searched from the air using helicopters, but we found no one,” Michalska said.
Campaigners said the authorities’ efforts were inadequate.
Under new rules introduced after a state of emergency in the migrant crisis expired last week, activists who are not resident in the border area cannot enter to help with any search.
International organizations have accused Poland’s right-wing nationalist government of breaching humanitarian standards in forcing some migrants back into Belarus, a charge Warsaw denies.
Iraqi migrant girl, 4, goes missing along Polish-Belarus border
https://arab.news/639vh
Iraqi migrant girl, 4, goes missing along Polish-Belarus border
- Poland has sealed off the region along its frontier with Belarus to outsiders as it has sought to keep out thousands of people from the Middle East and Africa
- Humanitarian groups reported that the Iraqi girl was separated from her parents after they breached the border into Poland on Monday
Israel says carrying out ‘large-scale strikes’ on Tehran
JERUSALEM: The Israeli military said it launched “large-scale strikes” on Tehran on Monday, two days since the start of a US-Israeli campaign against Iran.
“The Israeli Air Force... has begun an additional wave of strikes against the Iranian terror regime at the heart of Tehran,” the military said in a statement.
Israel announced the new “large-scale” strikes, while President Donald Trump vowed to avenge the deaths of US service members and said the war could last for weeks.
In other developments:
• The European Union has warned of the cost to the Middle East of a long war, and said it was reinforcing its naval mission in the Red Sea with additional vessels as Iran’s retaliation to US-Israeli strikes threatens maritime traffic, a European diplomat said.
Two new French ships will join the EU’s Aspides mission, bringing to five the number of warships taking part, the diplomat told AFP.
• Gulf states vowed to defend themselves against Iranian attacks, including by “responding to the aggression” if need be, after the Gulf Cooperation Council convened via video-link to formulate a unified response.
• Top US officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio will make the case Tuesday to Congress for the attack on Iran. Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and military chief General Dan Caine “will brief the full membership of both chambers of Congress,” White House spokesman Dylan Johnson said.
• Container shipping company Maersk said it was halting passage through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz for “safety” reasons.
The Danish group was the latest of several shipping groups to make similar announcements after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards declared the strait closed on Saturday.
• Seven people were injured in the Jerusalem area following the latest salvo of missiles fired from Iran, Israeli firefighters said.
• British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he had agreed to let the United States use UK bases to fire “defensive” strikes aimed at destroying Iranian missiles and their launchers. But in a video address posted to social media, he added: “We were not involved in the initial strikes on Iran and we will not join offensive action now.
• Iranian media reported that a police station in a city on the outskirts of Tehran had been hit, killing an unspecified number of people, with others reportedly trapped under debris. “According to initial reports, a number of citizens were martyred and some were trapped under the rubble,” the Tasnim news agency reported.
• Iranian news agency ISNA reported that Gandhi hospital in northern Tehran had been targeted by strikes. The Fars and Mizan agencies published a video, presented as being from inside the facility, showing debris on the floor among wheelchairs.
