An asylum seeker sleeping under a bridge in Athens (photo from the New York Times – more here)
Last week, the New York Times had a great article about the “Lost Boys of Afghanistan” – a phrase referring to the thousands of Afghan boys (“unaccompanied minors,” mostly teenagers) who are traversing through Europe in search of peace and stability. We’ve seen boys as young as 12 and 13 pass through our ministry center – without parents, without siblings, without a family of any kind except for the other Afghan boys that they met along the way. Please take a minute to read the entire NYT article – HERE.
Blanche Tax, a senior policy officer at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Brussels, said that last year 3,090 Afghan minors requested asylum in Austria, Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany — the European Union countries where their numbers rose the most sharply — more than double the 1,489 requests in those countries in 2007.
Paul W
September 4, 2009
Thanks for linking to this story. Moises Saman’s photography is amazing; his recent work from Iraq over the summer is equally harrowing.