The continuous efforts made by Morocco in terms of the fight against irregular migration continue while adopting a humanist approach. The Moroccan authorities succeeded in rescuing more than two hundred migrants in the Atlantic during operations carried out last Wednesday and Saturday.
On July 8, the Royal Moroccan Navy carried out a rescue operation to help a group of 87 migrants from Senegal. The distress of these migrants was reported while they were sailing aboard a cayuco (small dugout canoe) towards the Canary Islands. In addition, a corpse was also discovered on board the craft. The survivors were transported to the port of Dakhla. Their journey lasted eleven days since their departure from Senegal on June 27th.
A few days later, on July 12, the Moroccan Navy again carried out a rescue at sea, this time assisting 148 people. Details regarding the number of boats used and the nationalities of the rescued migrants were not specified by the sources consulted by the EFE news agency.
In addition, the NGO Caminando Fronteras revealed that the Moroccan authorities recently rescued 40 people who were on board another boat from Senegal, which had been drifting for 18 days. The survivors were also taken to Dakhla, although it remains unclear whether they were among the 148 people rescued on Wednesday.
The spokeswoman for this migrant advocacy organization, Helena Maleno, told Spanish news agency EFE that survivors reported that 60 people were on board the boat, which means that around 20 migrants remain. missing.
According to Maleno, the Moroccan authorities “save lives” thanks to these rescue operations in Atlantic waters. ” These are already condemned boats, if these authorities had not spotted them, the migrants would have ended up dying“, she affirmed.
Remember that in recent years, thousands of people have arrived in the Canary Islands on board traditional fishing boats or makeshift boats, mainly from Senegal, Mauritania and Morocco. According to Caminando Fronteras, in the month of May alone, ten boats from Senegal arrived on the coasts of the archipelago.
Along with the rescue operations and the flows arriving in the islands, last month around 50 Moroccan migrants went missing off the coast of Agadir after trying to reach the Canary Islands. On June 11, the same spokesperson for the NGO had indicated, in a tweet, that ” 58 people, including 21 women and a baby, were on the verge of death due to the sinking of the inflatable boat in which they were heading to Las Palmas“.