Humanitarian crisis looms for women and babies stuck on Greece's border with Macedonia

Dispatch: Around 13,000 refugees are marooned amid mud and squalor after Macedonia effectively closed border

A young child looks out from a tent during in the ever-growing refugee camp in Idomeni, northern Greece
A young child looks out from a tent during in the ever-growing refugee camp in Idomeni, northern Greece Credit: Photo: EPA/SIMELA PANTZARTZI

Crammed into a blue tent in a muddy refugee encampment on Greece’s border with Macedonia, Manal Yassin and her sister try their best to keep their six small children entertained.

The kids, two of them just a year old, nibble on apples and biscuits provided by aid agencies or play with a balloon given to them by the charity Save the Children.

Ms Yassin, 37, and her sister, Fedaa Sady, 27, are among the growing number of Syrian women who made the exhausting odyssey from their homeland, via Turkey and the Greek islands, without their husbands.

“They could not come with us,” said Ms Yassin, from Damascus, peering out from a jumble of grey blankets, nappies and children’s clothes. “Very big trouble for them. Assad’s people would have locked them up or shot them.”

The family has been stuck in the windswept, makeshift camp for 10 days, after Macedonia imposed draconian restrictions on how many people it will allow to cross the border.

There are now around 13,000 refugees, most of them from Syria and Iraq, living amid mud and squalor in the camp at Idomeni, on Greece’s northern border, the only point at which refugees are allowed to cross.

Hundreds more arrive every day, trudging through the wheat fields with rucksacks on their backs and their possessions piled high in cheap shopping trolleys and push chairs.

More than 55 per cent of the refugees are women and children – a dramatically higher proportion than anything seen so far in Europe’s worsening refugee crisis.

In many cases, they are trying to reach Europe to be reunited with husbands and brothers who made the dangerous journey last year and are now settled in Germany, Scandinavia and other countries offering asylum.

“Either the men are already in Europe, or they have been killed in the war,” said Amar Abukhashrir, a teenager from Damascus who is travelling with an extended family group, including seven small children.

Children shelter from the rain as they wait at a refugee camp at the Greek-Macedonia border
Children shelter from the rain as they wait at a refugee camp at the Greek-Macedonia border

Many of the women are pregnant, and some have given birth in the last few days. They are taken to the nearest hospital in the town of Kilkis, 40 miles away, where they can be properly cared for.

The camp at Idomeni, which was awash with mud and enormous puddles after a heavy downpour, is now temporary home to hundreds of babies, toddlers and older children.

Doctors are seeing rising numbers of children suffering from fevers, vomiting and diarrhoea.

“The demographic has completely flipped since last summer,” said Gemma Gillie, a British spokeswoman for Medecins Sans Frontieres.

“Last year it was the strongest young men who were sent first, because it was a journey into the unknown. Now it is the women and children who are following. We have a woman here with a three-day-old baby.

“There are babies everywhere. Their first days of life are being spent in this camp and this could be all they know for a very long time. Our medical teams have never seen this number of young children in a situation like this. It’s totally unsustainable.”

Macedonia grudgingly let a few hundred refugees through the border post this week but says that it will only permit as many people as countries to its north, such as Slovenia and Austria, are willing to accept.

A child draws on a container bearing the slogan 'borders are illegal' at a makeshift camp near the Greek village of Idomeni
A child draws on a container bearing the slogan 'borders are illegal' at a makeshift camp near the Greek village of Idomeni

More than a million migrants and refugees reached Europe last year, but now the seemingly unstoppable tide of humanity has been brought to an abrupt halt on Greece’s northern border, amid rolling farmland.

A domino effect of border closures has combined to create a volatile flashpoint, with frustration and anger threatening to boil over at any time. On Monday Macedonian police fired tear gas after some refugees tried to smash down the border gates.

The day afterwards, refugees protested in front of the frontier fence, chanting “Open the border”.

Women and children held up signs, in English, reading “We Are Human” and “Merkel Help Us”.

When a Greek army helicopter clattered overhead, refugees waved frantically.

But for some children, the sight of the helicopter brought back dark memories.

A girl cries as she flees clashes during a protest at the Greek-Macedonian border, near the Greek village of Idomeni
A young girl in distress as she runs from the police firing teargas on Monday

“Some of them burst into tears – it reminds them of what they experienced back home in Syria or Iraq,” said Caroline Haga, from the Red Cross.

Armoured cars belonging to the Macedonian army are parked behind a double line of razor wire and fencing, with soldiers and police standing guard.

A vast shanty town has developed in the muddy fields surrounding the small village of Idomeni – a new “Jungle”, the squalid camp in Calais that is being demolished by the French authorities.

With so many colourful tents pitched side by side amid the mud and litter, it is like a dark, desperate parody of the Glastonbury music festival.

Children play football on the outskirts of the encampment, while babies and toddlers cough and cry in cramped tents, as the smoke from tiny fires billows in the wind.

“The situation is getting more and more bleak,” said Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the UNHCR. “It is deteriorating by the hour. We are heading for a humanitarian crisis.”

There is still heavy snow on the mountains of southern Macedonia, just beyond the razor wire fence, and nights are bone-chillingly cold.

Tents are daubed with messages in spray paint – “Helps Us It’s Cold” and “Open the Borders”.

A migrant holding a child stands in a makeshift camp at the Greek-Macedonian border,near the Greek village of Idomeni
A man tries to keep himself and a young boy warm as the wait with thousands of others at the border

“Keep your blanket with you throughout your journey. You will need it,” advises a sign posted by the UNHCR on the wall of a white Portakabin.

Young men forage for firewood in the surrounding countryside, hauling entire dead trees along the roads with which to fuel fires to cook meals and boil tea.

Personal possessions are scattered around – a pink teddy bear, a pack of “Giggles” nappies hanging on the handle of a pushchair, rucksacks and clothes.

A boy of about 10, wearing a t-shirt with the slogan “It’s Good to be Me”, asked a Red Cross official if any tents were available for his family. He was told there were not – maybe they would arrive the next day.

A surreal micro-economy has sprung up.

Syrians and Iraqis sell packs of cigarettes to their fellow refugees, shouting “Marlboro, Marlboro, Winston” to the milling crowds.

A barber has set up a plastic chair between the tents, offering haircuts and wet shaves for a few euros, while local Greek farmers sell apples from the back of pick-up trucks.

“It’s bad here, very bad. It’s very cold at night and it has been raining,” said Salam Mashhadi, 35, who had been waiting at the frontier for six days with his 21-year-old wife and their one-year-old baby.

“We are waiting, waiting, but they only let a few people across the border each day. We want to go to Germany,” said the computer technician from Aleppo, who fled the city after his business and home were destroyed by bombing.

“We have been here for 11 days but others have been here for two weeks,” said Shajaa Al-Khalil, 35, an English teacher from the city of Daraa, which has been badly damaged during fighting between Syrian rebels and government forces.

A refugee sits beneath a thick blanket in a field outside the refugee camp in Idomeni
A lady wraps hersef in a thick blanket to keep warm

He poked his head out of a tent which he shares with members of his family, including three children aged seven, four and two.

“I would like to go to Germany. I want to work and so does my wife – she is a philosophy lecturer. We don’t want to take money from the German government,” he said.

Red Cross volunteers handed out donated puzzles, games and pencils to a small group of children, to try to keep them occupied during the long days of waiting.

Freckle-faced Syrian boys played Snakes and Ladders in the lee of a Portakabin on the fringes of the camp, which now sprawls across several fields.

“Nobody knows when we will be allowed to cross,” said Alan Moussa, 25, a maths teacher from Aleppo who paid Turkish and Syrian smugglers $400 to take him by boat from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesbos.

With implacable resistance from Balkan countries to allowing the refugee exodus to resume, it could be a very long wait.

Greece’s deputy migration minister warned this week that up to 150,000 refugees could be marooned in the country for two to three years.

"In my opinion, we have to consider the border closed," said Ioannis Mouzalas. "And for as long as the border crossing is closed, and until the European relocation and resettlement system is up and running, these people will stay in our country for some time."

The Greek authorities are trying to manage the crisis, with the army building four camps well south of the border with a capacity for 20,000 refugees.

Outside the village of Nea Kavala, hundreds of white tents have been set up on an old military airfield.

Sagging and made of canvas, they resembled a British Army camp from the Boer War.

“When it rains, this will become a sea of mud,” one aid worker said.

The military camps are open, and many refugees simply walk out of the gates, tramping 20 miles or more to the Idomeni border crossing in the hope of continuing north through the Balkans.

The Telegraph walked for several miles with Imad Bashash, 22, a Syrian, as he trudged through the fields with two large rucksacks on his shoulders.

“I ran away from Syria because the regime wanted to put me in the army and I would have had to kill my own people,” he said.

“I waited for five years for the war to end but in the end I had to leave. In the rebel-held areas there is no water, no food, no electricity; no life. If there was peace tomorrow, with Assad gone, of course I would return.”

With the Macedonia border all but closed, there are concerns now that frustrated refugees will seek a new, but much more dangerous route to Western Europe – swinging west through northern Greece to Albania, from where they would have a shot at crossing the Adriatic to southern Italy.

That would be a nightmare scenario for Italy, which is already struggling to deal with the tens of thousands of migrants and refugees who cross the Mediterranean in leaky boats from the coast of lawless Libya.

The crossing from Albania to Italy’s southern region of Puglia is around 50 miles – much longer than the short voyages from Turkey to Aegean islands like Lesbos, Kos and Samos, which have already claimed the lives of more than 400 people this year.

“It will be more risky because it is much longer than the Turkey to Greece crossings, and you will also have the involvement of the Albanian mafia,” said Marie-Elisabeth Ingres, the head of mission in Greece for Medecins Sans Frontieres.

“We don’t know exactly when the new route will start, but I’m sure it will happen.”

The Italian coast guard is stepping up patrols along the coast of Puglia, where smugglers could land in rocky coves and secluded bays with their human cargo.

Macedonia’s president predicted this week that it is only a matter of time before traffickers seize on the opportunities presented by the near-closure of his country’s border with Greece.

“No-one wants to stay in Greece, Macedonia and Serbia,” said Gjorge Ivanov. “The goal of the refugees is Germany. They will find a path there; a dangerous path.”