“With great sadness, we learned of the death of at least 18 immigrants from the fire in the forest of Dadia,” Dimitris Kairidis, Greece’s migration minister, said in a statement Tuesday. “This tragedy confirms, once again, the dangers of irregular immigration.”
Kairidis added that he denounced the “murderous activity of criminal traffickers” which is “what endangers the lives of many migrants both on land and at sea every day.”
Two other people were killed in this week’s fires — an 80-year-old shepherd and an apparent migrant — bringing the death toll in Greece to at least 20.
While migration numbers into Greece from Turkey have dropped in recent years as a result of strict border controls and deals with Ankara, Greece remains a front-line country for migration to Europe. The Eastern Mediterranean route — which includes arrivals by land and sea — has seen more than 17,000 people trying to cross this year, mostly from Syria, the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq.
Earlier Tuesday, the Hellenic Fire Service said that because there were no reports of missing people from surrounding areas, “the possibility that these are people who entered the country illegally is being investigated.”
In early August, Greek officials met to coordinate migration policy after more than 100 migrants — mostly from Syria and Iraq, including 53 children — were found crossing the border in Evros, the Associated Press reported. Last week, Greece’s coast guard stopped nearly 100 migrants in inflatable boats crossing through the Aegean Sea from Turkey — with such crossings increasing in recent weeks, officials said.
Sixty-three wildfires broke out in Greece within 24 hours, the fire service said Monday. The agency added that it sent out more than 100 evacuation messages for the broad area since Monday, amid windy, dry conditions as Southern European temperatures hit 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).
On Tuesday, the Ministry for Climate Crisis and Civil Protection issued a “very high fire risk” alert for several areas.
Authorities have been evacuating affected villages as the wildfires spread. Flames threatened to engulf a hospital in Alexandroupolis, prompting officials to evacuate all of its patients — including newborns and those in intensive care units — onto a ferry that became a makeshift hospital on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Nuns from a monastery were also evacuated, local media reported.
Satellite images recorded massive plumes of smoke streaming from the affected areas.
Theodore Giannaros, a fire meteorologist and associate researcher at the National Observatory of Athens, called the 18 deaths a “true tragedy.” Nearly 99,000 acres have been burned in the past three days.
“These facts clearly stress … that we need to change our whole approach for managing wildfires in Greece,” he said, calling for an integrated and interdisciplinary fire management approach and better collaboration between authorities and the scientific community.
Fire officials and researchers have raised alarm bells at the region’s lack of preparedness for wildfires — which are increasing in intensity, length and geographic breadth alongside summer heat waves.
The E.U. mobilized more resources Tuesday to help Greece’s firefighting battle. In the last two days, the E.U. has deployed seven airplanes, one helicopter, 114 firefighters and 19 vehicles, the E.U. commission said in a statement.
Greece is seeing “an unprecedented scale of wildfire devastation this summer,” European Commissioner for Crisis Management Janez Lenarcic, said in a statement Tuesday.
