Air route to Belarus closed to migrants in bid to halt crisis

Dubai on Sunday began banning travelers from Iraq from passing through the emirate on their way to Belarus, cutting off the last major air route from the Middle East to Minsk in an effort to halt a humanitarian crisis that has left thousands of people stranded at Belarus’s border with Poland. Along with the Iraqis, Syrians also appeared to be blocked from boarding airlines in Dubai, despite holding Belarusian visas, according to travel agents and passengers. Some had leveraged their life savings to make the journey. The flight ban followed an intense diplomatic campaign by European Union members alarmed by a tide of thousands of mostly Iraqi migrants lured to Belarus when it loosened its visa rules in August. Hoping for a path into the European Union, they instead found themselves in freezing forest camps on the border of Poland, Latvia and Lithuania. The EU has called the moves by Belarus an attempt to “weaponize” migrants and force a crisis in order to punish the EU for its criticism of its strongman leader, Alexander Lukashenko. Over the course of the weekend, several airlines in the region put in effect bans similar to that imposed in Dubai. But the effect was more immediate in Dubai, where airline employees prevented some travelers from boarding planes, effectively stranding them. Some Kurds in Dubai, fleeing Iraq primarily for economic reasons, said they had been prevented from boarding flights operated by Belavia, Belarus’s state-owned airline.<br/>