Around 600 Iraqis To Return Home From Belarus

Around 600 Iraqis stranded for weeks on the Belarus-Poland border are expected to return home on November 26, the Iraqi government and officials in the autonomous Kurdish region have said.

Hundreds of Iraqis, most of them Kurds, returned home last week on the first repatriation flight from Belarus, where thousands of migrants have camped in freezing temperatures during a standoff between Belarus and the European Union.

Iraqi Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmad al-Sahaf said that 617 citizens were being voluntarily repatriated on two Iraqi Airways flights from the Belarusian capital, Minsk, the official Iraqi news agency reported on November 25.

Both planes are due to land in the early hours of November 26 in Irbil, the capital of the northern Kurdish region, Kurdistan regional government spokesman Jotiar Adil said on Twitter.

On November 18, a total of 431 migrants returned on an Iraqi Airways plane from Minsk. The plane stopped first in Irbil before flying on to Baghdad.

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