(AFP) Aryan Wali Zellmi, a 25-year-old Iraqi Kurd, had tried twice to enter the European Union through Belarus. This time, he got stuck on the freezing border with Poland, joining hundreds in a crisis that the EU blames on Minsk.
Zellmi is one of between 2,000 and 3,000 migrants — mostly from Iraqi Kurdistan, but also from other volatile Middle Eastern countries like Syria — who have camped at the forested Polish border for a week.
With many young children and women among them, the migrants have slept in sub-zero temperatures in a makeshift camp, hoping to be let into the European Union.
A barbed wire fence separates them from the Polish army, which has not let them through and created an emergency zone along its border.
