Doctor warns Iraqi Kurds: Illegal path to EU can be deadly

A Kurdish doctor working at a Polish hospital has been treating Iraqi and Syrian migrants who have entered Poland from Belarus and gotten trapped in a dank forest

BIELSK PODLASKI, Poland -- Dr. Arsalan Azzaddin was seeing migrants from Iraq and Syria being brought into a hospital in eastern Poland every day with hypothermia, pneumonia, broken bones and severe dehydration. So he asked a Kurdish TV channel to let him go on the news to warn people in his homeland not to attempt the dangerous journey into the European Union through the Belarus-Poland border.

“I want them not to come. They could die,” Azzaddin told The Associated Press on Monday.

At first, the medical director of the Bielsk Podlaski hospital was accused by some viewers of doing the bidding of the Polish government, which has taken a hard line in seeking to keep out migrants, using razor wire and a show of border police and military to stop attempts to sneak across the EU's eastern border.

So he returned again to Kurdish TV, this time letting his patients describe their suffering from their hospital beds.