Greece asks for funds from EU to extend border wall along Turkey

PanARMENIAN.Net - Greek officials said they would renew a request to the European Union next year for funds to extend its steel wall along Greece's border with Turkey, Newsweek reports.

Takis Theodorikakos, a member of the Hellenic Parliament, said at a parliamentary briefing that the country also plans to expand its artificial intelligence system at the border. This system takes data from surveillance towers via sensors and long-range cameras and flags the most pressing information for border security.

Theodorikakos said Greece can expect more attempted illegal migrant crossings from non-EU Turkey, similar to how many migrants attempted to cross into EU nations like Poland from non-EU Belarus last month.

"We believe the security on our own borders is linked to the security of the EU," he said.

According to Theodorikakos, the wall and the security system have already helped to stop over 143,000 crossings via the Greece-Turkey border this year through October. This is a 45 percent increase from last year.

The Pulitzer Center reported that in February 2020, the Turkish government announced it would no longer patrol its border with Greece and would not help to keep migrants out of the EU. This stalled the 2016 EU-Turkey deal, in which tens of thousands of migrants were stopped from entering Greece in exchange for aid money and visa-free EU travel to Turkish citizens.