More than a hundred migrants from Gambia were sent home on January 1 from a Libyan Misrata airport as part of the International Organization for Migration's (IOM) voluntary return programme.
The programme puts illegal migrants who ended up in Libya on a one-way flight back to their home countries to ease severe overcrowding in the country's detention centres.
The Gambian migrants were flown to Misrata from Zawiya and Zuwara, two western Libyan cities, proceeding to board a plane back to the Gambian capital, Banjul.
IOM, the United Nations migration agency, has stepped up the rate at which it flies migrants home from Libya, evacuating up to 15,000 in the final month of 2017.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants have been crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean to reach Europe through Libya in each of the past several years. Thousands die crossing the desert and at sea. Many are now being held in camps in Libya in conditions rights groups describe as inhumane.
SOURCE: DD News
