Kurdish doctor in Poland warns migrants not to come

A medical doctor of Kurdish origin working in Poland has warned people back in his homeland not to attempt the increasingly deadly journey into the European Union through Belarus and Poland.

Dr. Arsalan Azzaddin was seeing migrants from Iraq and Syria coming into his hospital in eastern Poland every day in serious condition, with hypothermia, pneumonia, broken bones and severe dehydration.

So he asked a Kurdish TV channel to let him go on the news to warn people back in his homeland not to attempt the journey.

At first, the medical director of the district hospital of Bielsk Podlaski was accused by some viewers of doing the bidding of the Polish government, which has taken a hard line seeking to keep out migrants, using razor wire and a massive force build up to stop the illegal attempts to cross what is the EU's eastern border.

So he returned again to Kurdish TV, this time letting his patients describe their suffering from their hospital beds.

And he had a message for the Iraqi leaders: "Save those people," he told the Associated Press on Monday, recounting what he said in that broadcast. "Kurds don't deserve something like this."

His appeal came as EU officials also mounted pressure on Iraq to halt the migration.

Only days later the Iraqi government began taking steps to stop the migration of Iraqis, many of them Kurds, to Belarus, halting  flights and closing bureaus that issued travel visas to Belarus.

Azzaddin, originally from Irbil, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, has lived in Poland for 40 years and is the medical director of a the hospital in Bielsk Podlaski, a town of about 25,000 people some 30 km (20 miles) from the border with Belarus.

Migrants and refugees, mostly from the Middle East, have been trying to cross the border since the summer in hopes of finding better lives in Europe.

The EU accuses the authoritarian president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, of orchestrating the migrant crisis in retaliation for sanctions imposed over an election in 2020 widely viewed as flawed and a harsh crackdown on internal dissent.

Most of the migrants seek to reach Germany or elsewhere in Western Europe.

And after a million refugees came to the EU in 2015 alone, the EU has since embarked on policies to keep out any large new groups of asylum-seekers.

With Poland's border increasingly sealed, it has gotten harder and harder for migrants to make their way into Poland and on to the West.

Many are getting trapped in a dank forest of bogs that is growing colder, dipping into subfreezing temperatures at night.

Azzaddin on Monday said his hospital has been receiving from two to five migrants a day needing urgent medical treatment.