According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, the number of people attempting to enter Greece illegally from Turkey has risen dramatically this year.

The average number of people arrested, intercepted or rescued by the Greek Coast Guard every year since 2002 has been around 3,000. So far this year, there have been almost 4,500 such cases, according to Coast Guard figures.

As you would expect, most of them are fleeing war-zones and other troubled areas such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.

In the first six months of this year alone, some 3,500 Iraqis applied for asylum in Greece, the second highest number in any industrialised country, after Sweden

In the hysteria about illegal immigration, we must not forget that they are not numbers. They are people who are taking huge risks to escape their own devastated countries. They are people who fear for their lives and the lives of their families if they stay. They are people who, unlike you and I, cannot just pick up our passports and travel anywhere we like.

People do not pack up their few processions, pay their life savings to unscrupulous traffickers and climb into leaky boats unless there is a desperate reason. Some will never reach their destination. Official figures from the UNHCR show

that last year at least nine people died and 10 were missing at sea, but up until late September this year there had been 44 deaths and 54 missing in the Aegean Sea

One of those numbers was five year old Hodan, a little girl from Somalia who was making the journey with her mother, Deqa. Her parents (above) spoke to the UNHCR at a detention centre in Samos where they were reunited after her tragic death. Read the full story here.

Technorati: Greece, immigration, trafficking, asylum, refugees