ERBIL — Iraq’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday announced an investigation into Belarusian reports claiming that Polish border guards executed Iraqi refugees on the eastern EU borders last year.
Late in 2021, thousands of Iraqi and Kurdish nationals, including women and children, traveled to Belarus using easy tourist visas in hopes of crossing the border into the EU and search for a better life.
Poland, and its Western allies, soon accused Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of orchestrating the crisis and using the migrants as pawns to destabilize the European Union in retaliation for its sanctions on his authoritarian regime.
Belarusian and Russian news outlets said today that Belarusian authorities hosted an Iraqi delegation on June 21 to present them with new evidences proving that Polish soldiers executed a number of Iraqi migrants last year and secretly buried them in the border areas to prevent the group from entering the EU.
The Belarusian authorities, according to the reports, also handed over to the Iraqi delegation evidences regarding “illegal actions of Poland including deportation and torture, which resulted in the death of refugees from the Middle East, including Afghanistan and Iraq.”
“We will investigate the reports which are shared with us by Mink about the fate of the Iraqi refugees on the Polish borders,” said Iraqi Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Ahmed al-Sahaf in a brief statement.
BasNews has learned that several people from the Kurdistan Region are confirmed missing by their families more than six months since the beginning of the crisis.
However, the Belarusian reports could not be immediately verified by BasNews.