Word: iraq
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When police demolished the illegal refugee squatter camp known as "the Jungle" in northern France in September, the French intended to make a statement - that European governments were finally getting serious about stemming the constant tide of asylum seekers who have fled war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan for the continent. A month later, French and British officials have begun to forcibly deport some of the tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan refugees whose epic journeys have ended in detention camps in Europe - making good on a threat they have voiced for months...
...whether it will do anything to deter refugees from making the arduous trip to the continent in the first place. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said on Oct. 21 that Europe now receives 75% of the world's asylum seekers. And increasingly, these migrants are from Iraq and Afghanistan. About 13,200 Iraqis applied for asylum worldwide between January and August - the largest number for a single country for the fourth year running. Afghans followed a close second...
...Afghanistan war drags into its ninth year and the Iraq war its seventh year, the European Union faces a unique challenge in trying to stop refugees from these countries. Unlike the huge numbers of Africans trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe, Iraqi and Afghan migrants face only an overland journey - though one that can take months. Once they reach the E.U., usually by crossing from Turkey into Greece, migrants can easily slip over internal E.U. borders, crossing numerous countries without detection. Many of them attempt to make it Britain, where they speak the language and have relatives. Those...
...rest were flown back to immigrant jails in Britain. One of the Iraqis aboard the plane told an Iraqi refugee organization that the soldiers had ordered the British officials to "go away and not try to send people back by force again." (See pictures of life returning to Iraq's streets...
...saying it is unlikely to stop the influx of people into Europe and is possibly unethical. "There is a paradox," says Dan Hodges, director of the London-based charity Refugee Action. "We are consistently being told of the extreme nature of the military struggle against extremists and terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, but when it comes to people seeking sanctuary, the governments' policies are more nuanced." (Read "How the Afghan Election Was Rigged...