WATCH ABOVE: Baker describes the ordeal she and family members went through to ‘escape war’
A ferry carrying about 2,500 migrants who had arrived clandestinely on Greek islands from the nearby Turkish coast docked Thursday in Greece’s main port of Piraeus near Athens.
The ferry was chartered by the government and served as a registration centre on the eastern Aegean island of Kos this week.
It left Kos on Wednesday with 1,300 migrants and picked up hundreds more from the islands of Leros, Kalymnos and Lesbos.
Vian Baker, a 21-year-old Syrian from Aleppo, said a dangerous crossing from Turkey led to a scramble for survival on the Greek island of Leros.
“We slept on the street. We didn’t have blankets,” she said. “We didn’t have anything. Even water. … We begged for water, we begged for food.”
She explained how she and her father and sister made the difficult 15 day journey from their home country to Greece, looking for a better future in Europe. Her mother has remained in Syria.
“We stayed in the woods for like six hours and then the Turkish Army started to yell and go and get out of our country so after that we waiting until night so we can go to Turkey and there they started to shoot, but above, in the sky,” she explained. “And then we went.”
“We couldn’t live there. Bombs and war you know, war in Syria, My college also started to be dangerous, so we couldn’t, I left my college.”
The coast guard said it had picked up 519 people in 16 search and rescue operations from Wednesday morning to Thursday morning off the coasts of the islands of Samos, Agathonissi, Kos and Farmakonissi.
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