4 children among 22 dead as another migrant boat sinks off Turkish coast

ANKARA, Turkey – Four children were among 22 migrants who drowned off of Turkey’s Aegean coast on Tuesday, two days after another boat capsized in stormy weather, killing 34 refugees trying ot make it to Europe.

The state-run Anadolu Agency (AA) quoted local officials as saying the latest tragedy happened off the island of Karaada in Bodrum Bay, as a 15-meter day-trip vessel packed with hundreds of refugees failed to make it to the Greek island of Kos.

The Turkish coast guard said it had managed to rescue 211 people from the severely overcrowded vessel.

Thousands of refugees fleeing war, mainly in Syria and Iraq, have been setting out in overloaded and rickety boats or rubber dinghies for the short sail from Turkey to Kos or other nearby Greek islands.

Many have drowned, including a boat that capsized in high winds and stormy weather on Sunday, killing 34 people on board, 15 of them children, including four babies.

A deluge of migrants has been trying to reach Greece from Turkey by sea to seek asylum in Europe, which is struggling with the largest influx of refugees since World War II.

According to the International Organization for Migration, there have been more than 2,700 migrant fatalities in the Mediterranean Sea this year, 103 of them in the waters between Greece and Turkey.

Greece has received more than 309,000 refugees this year, mostly Syrians fleeing the civil war.

Early this month a dozen refugees drowned after their boat sank en route to Greece, including a three-year-old Syrian-Kurdish boy whose dead body became a symbol for the plight of desperate families risking lives to escape the Syrian war, now in its fifth year.

A news agency picture of the boy, identified as Aylan Kurdi, lying face down on a beach in Turkey, went viral on the Internet, shocking many.

According to the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR, the number of Syrian refugees in Turkey has increased by 200,000 over the last three months, now totalling nearly 2 million. 

Meanwhile, the number of Syrian refugees in Iraq and Lebanon has decreased during the same period, the UNHCR said.