Six families from Syria and Iraq boarded a plane in Athens on Wednesday bound for Luxembourg. They are the first 30 refugees to be relocated from Greece.
The relocation marks the start of a European Union plan aimed at easing the burden on EU border countries amid the 28-nation bloc’s biggest migration crisis since World War II.
The programme aims to relocate refugees who have arrived in Greece from Turkey to other European Union countries without them having to make the arduous and often dangerous overland journey across the Balkans on foot.
More than 600,000 refugees and migrants have arrived in Greece so far this year, most of them in the last few months.
