No less than six incidents were reported over the past 24 hours by Greece's coast guard of flimsy migrant boats, accompanied by Turkish patrol boats and gunboats, attempting to reach the northeast coast of Lesvos island - the preferred destination of people smugglers operating from the opposite Turkish coast since 2015.
The Hellenic Coast Guard on Friday provided video footage of the latest encounters, in one case showing a Turkish coast guard vessel attempt to harass and force a Greek vessel from the specific sea region.
None of the migrant boats managed to entered Greek territorial waters, officials in Athens claimed, with the former either returning to Turkish territory, from which they had most certainly set off, or its passengers being picked up by Turkish vessels.
The half-dozen attempts by migrant smugglers, amid the day's fair weather conditions, to reach northeast Lesvos with Turkish coast guard units in tow caused Athens to order a higher state of alert in the sea region.
Hundreds of thousands of third country nationals - asylum seekers and would-be economic migrants - ranging from sub-Saharan Africa to south Asia, but most from Middle East and Afghanistan, landed on a handful of eastern Aegean islands beginning in the spring of 2015, taking advantage of the then leftist SYRIZA government's lax attitude towards maritime border patrols and a lenient policy vis-a-vis third country asylum seekers arriving haphazardly from Turkey.
By the end of 2015, however, the coalition government - a small right-wing party was the junior partner - reversed this policy and attempted to deflect the migrant flows, although roughly 1.5 million people had by that time made their way to central and western Europe. Additionally, several "hotspots" had sprung up on the eastern Aegean islands, with the most notorious being the Moria camp on Lesvos.
