Another round of violence between groups of Mideast war refugees and irregular migrants at a cramped “hotspot” on the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos was reported overnight, with five minors taken to a local hospital with injuries sustained in the melee.
According to reports from local journalists, a group of Syrian minors were attacked by what they claimed Afghan minors, who in turn claimed they were being attacked by Iraqis.
It took the intervention of riot police to restore order at the Moria site.
Officially, more than 50,000 people designated as “migrants and refugees” from the most recent waves of third country nationals ferried onto various Greek isles from the adjacent Turkish coast over the past year and a half remain in the country. Thousands are still stranded in various temporary shelters and “hotspots” on the islands and the mainland, with Lesvos witnessing one of the biggest flows of refugees and would-be economic migrants headed into Europe since the end of the Cold War.
Between one million and a million and half people reached preferred European destinations, primarily Germany, until the so-called “Balkan route” was closed by national governments along the route. A tenuous EU-Turkey agreement to repatriate and relocate legitimate Syrian and Iraqi refugees was signed in the process.
