17 Syrian refugees drown off Turkish coast

Some 17 Syrians including five women and five children trying to reach Greece drowned Sunday when their boat sank in Turkish waters, local media reported.

The Turkish coastguard recovered the bodies from a wooden boat that had set off from Turkish holiday resort town of Bodrum for the Greek island of Leros, the Dogan news agency reported.

Gov. Amir Cicek of Mugla province told the state-run Anadolu Agency that the Turkish Coast Guard rescued 20 other Syrian refugees early on Sunday. No one was missing or unaccounted for.

Cicek said the 37 Syrians had boarded the boat at the holiday resort of Gumusluk on the Bodrum peninsula. It sank soon after leaving the coast.

The governor said an investigation had been launched into the incident.

EU leaders have agreed to boost aid for Syria’s neighbors, including one billion dollars through UN agencies, in a bid to mitigate the refugee influx into Europe.

Some 500,000 people have come to Europe so far this year, the International Organization for Migration says, many of them taking perilous journeys across the Mediterranean on inflatable dinghies.

More than 2,800 people have died or disappeared making the crossing since January.

Some 500 migrants were rescued in seven operations launched over the weekend in the Mediterranean, the Italian coastguard said.

A spokesman told AFP on Sunday that four of the rescue operations had already wound up but the others were ongoing.

“Saturday was quiet on the whole but now there is further movement,” he said. “We have had several interventions — one by a ship belonging to (medical charity) MSF, two coastguard units as well as an Italian naval ship and a ship belonging to EU Navfor Med,” he said.