A group of Afghans has been trapped for three weeks at the edge of a forest on the border between Poland and Belarus, caught between Polish security forces who will not let them enter Poland and Belarusian troops who won’t let them turn back.
A woman talks to a Polish border guard as stranded migrants believed to be from Afghanistan sit on the ground in the small vilage of Usnarz Gorny in northeastern Poland, Aug. 20, 2021.
The standoff is a result of the surge in migrants arriving at the European Union's borders that has been engineered by Belarus' authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko as suspected retaliation against the bloc for its support forEuropean officials have accused Belarus’ authorities of flying in migrants and then funneling them to its western borders with the goal of orchestrating a migration crisis meant to pressure its European neighbors.
She said the group was drinking unclean water from a nearby stream and surviving off bread delivered by the Belarusian guards every couple of days. The volunteers have been communicating with the Afghans via megaphone, she said, but Polish guards would often turn on their vehicle engines and sirens to try to drown them out.
“The situation on the border with Belarus is a crisis, it’s very tense, because Lukashenko’s regime is transporting people mainly from Iraq to the territory of Belarus and is then shoving these people on to the territory of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia to destabilize our countries,” Poland's prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said.
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