UN agencies on Monday said they were trying to provide urgent help to large numbers of migrants and refugees held and then stranded in the smuggling hub of Sabratha, Libya, as rival factions battled for control of the city.
At least 4,000 migrants and refugees, including pregnant women, newborn babies and unaccompanied children, have been transferred from informal camps and housing to a hangar in the city since the clashes ended on Friday, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said about 6,000 had been held at the informal sites.
Photo: Reuters
Hundreds of migrants and refugees who had left Sabratha arrived in Zuwara, about 25km to the west, on foot along the beach, Zuwara emergency committee head Sadeeq al-Jayash said.
“They come walking in groups ... for example there were various groups that came on Sunday — 50, then 100 and 200 at night,” al-Jayash said.
There were about 1,700 migrants and refugees in Zuwara “in desperate need of help,” he said.
Sabratha has been the most common point of departure for mostly sub-Saharan African migrants and refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean by boat from Libya.
However, the number of crossings dropped sharply in July after an armed group struck a deal with officials from the UN-backed government in Tripoli to block departures, under pressure from Italy and other EU member states.
That set off three weeks of fighting among rival factions that left at least 43 dead and 340 wounded, according to a new Libyan Ministry of Health toll, and ended with the withdrawal of the armed group.
The migrants and refugees who have since been rounded up were being held at sites that the group had controlled, local officials said.
“We are seriously concerned by the large number of migrants caught up in recent developments in Sabratha,” IOM Libya chief of mission Othman Belbeisi said in a statement.
Some migrants and refugees are being sent on to detention centers elsewhere in western Libya that are nominally under the control of the Tripoli government.
IOM officials said those centers, which were housing about 5,000 refugees, risk being overwhelmed by the new arrivals.
Conditions in the centers are often dire and abuse widespread.
“Alternatives to detention must be found for migrants in Libya. In the meantime, IOM continues to provide direct humanitarian, health and psychosocial assistance to meet the urgent needs of the thousands of migrants being affected,” Belbeisi said.
Local sources have previously said that an estimated 10,000 migrants and refugees were being held in the Sabratha area.
The head of Sabratha’s department for countering illegal migration on Saturday told reporters that help was badly needed as some migrants had received no food or water for six days.
The UNHCR said it had approached Libyan authorities to ensure that refugees among the migrants were freed from detention.
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