AANES brings 60 people from Algeria back home to Syria’s Kobani

KOBANI, Syria (North Press) — An official of the Autonomous Administration of North and East of Syria (AANES) in Kobani said on Wednesday the number of the refugees who they had brought home to Kobani from Algeria reached 60.

Nihad Ahmad, the deputy co-chair of the AANES Executive Council of Euphrates region said that the AANES has covered all expenses required to return the stuck refugees and carried out all the administrative and legal procedures to get them to their city of Kobani.

He added that the AANES also brought back the bodies of the refugees who sank off in Algeria’s maritime zone, and delivered them to their hometowns.

On October 5, a boat carrying Syrian migrants, who were heading towards Europe, sank off the coast of Algeria, killing at least 18 Syrians, most of whom were from the city of Kobani.

On November 9 of last year, the bodies of nine Syrians who died in the incident arrived to the cities of Kobani and Manbij, northern Syria.

Ahmad added that the AANES contacted the stuck people in Algeria, “who wanted to illegally emigrate to Europe with the help of brokers and smugglers, and helped them to return.” 

On Tuesday, representatives of the AANES in Kobani met with six people who were stuck in Algeria and brought back to Kobani recently. 

The meeting yesterday with six persons who recently returned from Algeria included discussions about their suffering, the routs they took and the methods they were smuggled by, he noted.

On November 15, 2022, the first batch of the stuck people arrived from Algeria to Kobani and included six people, one of them was a survivor of the incident.

Early November 2022, activists on social media circulated videos shows group of young men who were stranded in the Niger desert after the Algerian authority deported them to there.

Reporting by Fatah Issa