MINSK, November 28. /TASS/. Another Iraqi Airways plane with a group of Iraqi migrants on board took off early on Sunday from Minsk National Airport and is now en route to Erbil, a city in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
The plane is a Boeing 747-400 with a passenger capacity of 420 seats.
The next Iraqi Airways flight for Iraqi migrants is scheduled for November 29. It will depart at 12:45 local time (coincides with Moscow time). Another Erbil-bound flight will take off at 13:45 local time on November 30.
The migrant crisis on the Belarusian border with Latvia, Lithuania and Poland where migrants have been flocking since the beginning of the year, sharply aggravated on November 8. Several thousand people approached the Polish border from Belarus. Some of them attempted to cross into Poland by breaking the wired fence. Later on, about 2,000 people were accommodated at the logistics center in Bruzgi, not far from the Polish border. According to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, in addition to refugees from that center, between 2,000 and 3,000 migrants are staying on the territory of his country.
On November 18, over 400 migrants from Iraq were flown out of Minsk by an Iraqi Airways plane, arriving in Baghdad after a stopover in Erbil. A few more evacuation flights followed. Overall, about 1,000 people are estimated to have returned back to Iraq.