ISTANBUL: Twenty-two migrants, including seven children, drowned after a boat capsized off the Turkish coast on Thursday night.

Two people were rescued by the Turkish coastguard and another two managed to make it out of the water on their own, officials said. The victims’ nationalities were not yet known.

The boat capsized off Turkiye’s largest island, called Gokceada, which is located in the Aegean Sea off the coast of the north-western province of Canakkale, near Greece’s Lemnos island.

“The Turkish coastguard found the bodies of 22 people, including seven children,” the governor’s office said in a statement.

The search and rescue operation was backed by one aeroplane, two helicopters, a drone, 18 boats and 502 personnel, it added. Turkiye is hosting nearly four million refugees, mostly Syrians.

Many migrants try to reach Greek islands from Turkiye’s western coasts hoping to eventually reach prosperous European Union countries, with many dying in the perilous sea crossing.

Officials said the boat began sinking overnight and on Friday many ambulances were standing by at the port of Kabatepe, near Gokceada.

There has been an increase in migrant crossing attempts in the waters between Turkiye and Greece in recent weeks.

The Turkish coastguard indicated that it had rescued or intercepted several hundred migrants, including children, attempting to cross to Greece since the start of the week.

The EU border agency Frontex said this week that the number of irregular border crossings into the bloc in the first two months of this year reached 31,200 — similar to the level from a year ago, according to preliminary calculations.

In the eastern Mediterranean, the second most active migratory route after the Western African route, the number of detections more than doubled to 9,150 in the first two months of the year, it said.

Published in Dawn, March 16th, 2024