Iraqi baby buried as death toll in EU-Belarus crisis grows

By VANESSA GERA
Associated Press

BOHONIKI, Poland (AP) — A Polish imam recited prayers over the tiny white casket of an unborn Iraqi boy — the latest life claimed as thousands of migrants from the Middle East have tried to slip into the European Union and found their path cut off by soldiers in the forests of Poland and Belarus. The imam said in Islam, a fetus after four months is considered a human being and buried as one. There is no exact toll among those who since the summer have traveled to Belarus and then sought to cross into Poland, Lithuania or Latvia, the three EU countries on the eastern edge of the bloc. The EU considers the migration “hybrid warfare” waged by the authoritarian government of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.