Macedonia warned Wednesday it is running out of trains to transport the thousands of Syrian refugees heading toward the EU, and said it has urged its neighbours to help combat the “alarming situation”.
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Macedonian police spokesman Ivo Kotevski said that both police and the army will from now control the 50-kilometer (30 mile) stretch of the border in order to stop “the massive” influx of migrants coming from Greece.
Migration crisis in Europe has increased over the past year due to the increasing flow of migrants from North Africa, the Middle East, as well as Central and South Asia.
“This measure is being introduced for the security of (Macedonian) citizens who live in the border areas and better treatment of the migrants”, he said.
People, part of a new group of more than a thousand immigrants, hold placards as they wait at the border line of Macedonia and Greece to enter into Macedonia near Gevgelija railway station August 20, 2015.
On the Greek side of the border, two cargo trains and a one passenger train were stopped on August 20. Hundreds of migrants from the Greek island of Kos planned to move into Macedonia in the next few days. Having reached Greece, many migrants head for Macedonia in an attempt to transit to countries in Western Europe. Hungary is racing to complete a fence along its 175-km border with Serbia to keep them out, threatening to create a bottleneck of tens of thousands.
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Nearly 39,000 migrants, the majority of them from Syria and Afghanistan, have been registered to pass through Macedonia during the past month.
