Greece starts removing 8,000 refugees from Idomeni camp

Greek authorities have started removing thousands of stranded asylum-seekers from the makeshift camp of Idomeni on the Macedonian border. 

More than 400 riot police have been deployed in the operation, which started at dawn but is expected to last about a week to 10 days, according to the government's spokesman for the refugee crisis, Giorgos Kyritsis. 

At least 8,400 people, mostly refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, including many children and women, live at the informal camp. 

The first six buses carrying a total of 340 people left Idomeni to a new asylum processing centre near Greece's second city of Thessaloniki. 

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Doctors Without Borders (MSF) told Mashable their medical staff inside the camp are working in the clinic and the situation is very calm. 

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Greek authorities have tried for months to convince refugees to move to better facilities, but they were often unwilling for fears of detention of being stuck in an asylum limbo. 

At its peak, Idomeni housed more than 14,000, but numbers have declined after Macedonia shut its borders and people began accepting authorities' offers of alternative place to stay. 

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Journalists and volunteers were barred from the camp during the evacuation operation, stopped at a police roadblock a few miles away. 

On the eve of the evacuation operation, few at the camp appeared to welcome the news.

"It's much better here than in the camps. That's what everybody who's been there said," Hind Al Mkawi, a 38-year-old refugee from Damascus, told The Associated Press on Monday evening.

"I've heard (of the pending evacuation) too," she said. "It's not good ... because we've already been here for three months and we'll have to spend at least another six in the camps before relocation. It's a long time. We don't have money or work — what will we do?"

Abdo Rajab, a 22-year-old refugee from Raqqa in Syria, has spent the past three months in Idomeni, and is now considering paying smugglers to be taken to Germany clandestinely.

"We hear that tomorrow we will all go to camps," he said. "I don't mind, but my aim is not reach the camps but to go Germany."

The Associated Press contributed reporting. 

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