Doctor’s desperate plea as crisis worsens in Al-Hudaydah. Ashwaq Moharram is a gynaecologist at Al-Thawra Hospital, one of the last functioning medical centres in Yemen’s main port city of Al-Hudaydah. She spoke to the Independent about the rapidly deteriorating conditions in the city and for her patients as a months-long battle to re-take control of the port from Houthi rebels has reached the city centre over the past two weeks. Despite three days of relative calm, military operations continue and UNHCR reported on Friday that nine civilians were killed in Al Garrahi district earlier this week as they tried to flee towards safety. Moharram warned that people in Al-Hudaydah were not only dying from bullets, but from hunger and disease as supplies of nutritional supplements and medicines run out and food becomes unaffordable. “The situation is not just getting worse day by day but hour by hour," she said. | | |
| Greece to transfer 6,000 refugees to mainland. Migration Minister Dimitris Vitsas said on Thursday that 6,000 asylum-seekers and refugees would be moved from the islands to the mainland by the end of the year. He told reporters that so far this year, over 23,000 refugees had been transferred to the mainland, but that another 28,000 had arrived by sea. Last week, UNHCR urged Greece to take urgent steps to address severe overcrowding and worsening conditions on the islands of Samos and Lesvos . Vitsas promised that health centres would be set up on the five islands hosting asylum-seekers and that a sewage treatment plant was being built at the Moria reception centre on Lesvos. | | |
| Colombia opens first tent camp for Venezuelans. Authorities in the capital, Bogota, moved homeless Venezuelans from a growing shanty town near the city’s main bus station to a new tent camp on Tuesday. Reportedly, Colombia has avoided setting up camps, fearing they could become permanent fixtures and hinder integration, but officials said they had no choice but to offer tents to the destitute Venezuelans, many of them families with young children. The new camp has been set up to accommodate 500 people for a maximum of three months. Al Jazeera reports that by Wednesday, several dozen Venezuelans were waiting outside the camp gates hoping to be let in. | | |
| UN Syria adviser calls for lasting solution for citizens of Idlib. The past two months in Syria’s north-western Idlib province have been the quietest in five years with no air raids, UN humanitarian advisor Jan Egeland told reporters on Thursday. But he said there was still shelling along the perimeter of a so-called buffer zone put in place last month following an agreement reached by Russia and Turkey. Egeland described conditions inside the zone, where 2 to 3 million civilians live, as “ very tense” with frequent infighting between armed groups. “It’s no solution to freeze the situation as it is now,” said Egeland who also called for some 27,000 people displaced by fighting in eastern Deir ez-Zor Governorate to be moved from camps next to the battle zone. | | |
| UN rights experts leave Hungary after being denied access to border camps. A team of experts from the UN human rights office suspended an official visit to Hungary on Thursday after they were denied access to two ‘transit zones’ on the country’s border with Serbia where newly-arrived migrants and asylum-seekers, including children, are detained. “We have received a number of credible reports concerning the lack of safeguards against arbitrary detention in these facilities which called for a visit,” said members of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in a statement which noted that Hungary had invited them to conduct the visit. The European Court of Human Rights stepped in earlier this year amidst allegations that some asylum-seekers at the two camps were being denied food. | | |
| Mobile app pays refugees to boost artificial intelligence. Non-profit tech organization, Refunite, is piloting a new app in Uganda which allows refugees to earn money by using their phones to “train” algorithms for artificial intelligence (AI). The project is giving 5,000 refugees the opportunity to earn up to US$20 a day doing simple AI labelling work on their phones. Refunite co-chief executive Chris Mikkelsen described the project as a win-win for refugees who can learn digital skills and earn an income and for companies aiming to cut costs. The initiative aims to reach 25,000 refugees within two years. | | |
| Syrian refugee, Rawa Qaq, just graduated from his masters in dentistry at the University of Dundee in Scotland with a distinction and has now secured a fully-funded scholarship to complete his PhD at the university. He told the Independent he would repay the support he has received by using his forensic dentistry skills to help families identity victims of war in Syria and elsewhere. | | |
In October alone, fighting in Yemen’s Al Hudaydah governorate killed 94 civilians and injured 95 others. In the first week of November, another 34 people were killed.
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