Officials said more than 400 Iraqis who have been stranded in Belarus will be deported on a charter flight from Minsk to Baghdad, with a detour in Erbil.
Iraq's first deportation flight, scheduled for Thursday, intends to repatriate individuals who traveled to Belarus in the hopes of accessing Europe, amid tales of violence on both sides of the Poland-Belarus border, where temperatures are near freezing, and a dearth of humanitarian aid.
“Four hundred thirty Iraqi migrants have been documented to board the evacuation flight today to travel to Iraq,” said Ahmed al-Shhaf, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “The consular teams in Belarus are continuing to register the names of 50 others.”
It was not clear how many passengers ultimately boarded the plane.
This flight will be operated by an Iraqi Airways Boeing 770-440, which has a seating capacity of 412 passengers, according to the Minsk National Airport website.
Al-Sahhaf affirmed to Al Jazeera that no additional deportation flights are planned.
The flight from Minsk took off late Thursday afternoon.
It lands in Erbil, Iraq's northernmost city, where the majority of Kurds live. The remainder of the passengers will disembark in the early evening at Baghdad's airport.
The boarding gate appeared to be rather busy in videos shared online, with some passengers in wheelchairs.
There is no official count of refugees and asylum seekers stranded at the border, but estimates suggest that thousands of people, largely from Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, have traveled to Belarus in recent months and are now stranded between Belarus and Poland, seeking to gain entry to the European Union.
Iraq's repatriation proposal comes after months of rising tensions between Belarus and the EU, with critics accusing Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of exploiting vulnerable people as pawns in retaliation for Western sanctions against his government.
Flights to Belarus have now been blocked in Iraq, as well as other countries such as Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
