Kurdish boy froze to death at Polish-Belarusian border

A fourteen-year-old youth from Southern Kurdistan has died at the EU’s external border with Belarus. As InfoMigrants reports, the boy died of hypothermia on Wednesday night. Earlier, the Polish-language non-profit investigative portal OKO.press reported the case.

According to InfoMigrants, the Kurdish boy was staying in a tent camp near the Kuznica border crossing on the Belarusian side when he was found hypothermic and unconscious. Officials then took the child to a hospital, but he died there. Authorities in Minsk, however, denied the report. A statement from the Belarusian Border Guard said, “A Border Guard doctor assisted a child who showed signs of hypothermia.”

In the border region between Poland and Belarus, thousands of migrants are currently stranded in temperatures around freezing point. The majority are people from the southern part of Kurdistan, many of whom are Yazidis. In view of the humanitarian catastrophe, the EU is relying on military isolation instead of taking in migrants. Poland has stationed 15,000 soldiers in the area and is responding to attempts by migrants to cross the border with pushbacks that violate international law.

In the makeshift camp near Kuznica alone, more than 2,000 migrants are currently holding out in the most difficult conditions. Ten people have already died there in recent weeks, according to a report in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. At least seven dead people were found on the Polish side of the EU’s external border earlier this week. It is difficult to say how reliable these figures are – refugee aid workers assume that the number of unreported cases is high.