Finding the bodies of six people, including and an infant, off the shores of Kos island after a boat carrying refugees from Turkey to Greece capsized, calls for more cooperation amongst countries in terms of their regional coastlines that are normally subject to local as well as international surveillance and security against any criminal activity.

The fact that after swimming to the island in the Aegean Sea, one of the survivors notified the Greek authorities that 10 people had been onboard a small boat that turned over due to violent winds calls for reconsidering the current state of hesitation in conducting the needed rescue operations to reduce the daily increasing number of refugees getting killed.

The human tragedy in Syria has resulted in forcing over 45,000 refugees and immigrants to cross from Turkey to Greek islands since the beginning of 2016 (according to IOM), while hundreds others are waiting, which calls for declaring an international case of emergency and combining efforts, especially when the crossing points are known and have been repeatedly used.

The current migrations are not, of course, as serious as smuggling drugs or illegal items such as weapons and explosives that is already incriminated across various borders. In these cases, we find miserable people opting to fighting mighty waves and currents endangering their entire families, fathers, mothers and children's lives to escape death. Their bodies have been found on various coasts and it was only then that the world paid more attention and realized that those washed ashore were dead human beings and not dead fish!

The stars of such tragic stories were human beings, who driven by wishes to escape the threats of the war going on in their lands, endangered their lives to reach Europe regardless of the high walls, inspections and having to walk long distances in extremely low temperatures.

We all watched how in 2015, over 800,000 refugees landed on Greek islands on very old boats used by smugglers ferrying them to the other side of the Aegean Sea. We all watched how over 3,500 of them drowned in the Mediterranean in the same year, and this calls for the international community to 'humanize' those incidents and accelerate the pace of international joint efforts to save them.

By Labeed Abdal

[email protected]