Refugees and migrants at sea : another view from the Middle East and North Africa region

Over one million people embarked on irregular sea journeys in Europe, Asia, and the Horn of Africa in the course of 2015 alone, which raises the question as to why refugee protection on land is breaking down and what is forcing people to undertake boat journeys to obtain protection elsewhere. To understand the drivers and motivations for people moving irregularly, one must look at the conditions for displaced persons in what are commonly described as origin and transit countries, thus bringing into focus locations such as Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Turkey. This might seem contrary to media and government officials who often repeat the message that the ‘‘frontline’’ of Europe’s current refugee crisis starts at its southern Mediterranean borders in countries such as Italy and Greece. The largest driver of movement in the Middle East region is the ongoing war in Syria; the current scale of displacement in Syria, which is the result of conflict that commenced in 2011 after the Syrian uprising, includes 6.6 million internally displaced persons inside Syria, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, and 4.8 million refugees from Syria hosted in the neighboring countries of Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Putting these figures into context, the number of people who reached Europe by sea in 2015 was just over one million—mainly Syrians, with a smaller number of Afghans, Iraqis, and other nationalities.