[AnNahar] The first refugees left Greece on Wednesday under an EU relocation plan, but Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras warned they were a "drop in the ocean" as the number of illegal migrant entries surged to 800,000 this year.
The six Syrian and Iraqi families, who are starting new lives in Luxembourg, are the first to be relocated from Greece under plans to share out nearly 160,000 migrants across the bloc in a scheme fiercely opposed by some EU members.
A Greek asylum service official said the Iraqi and Syrian families leaving Athens on Wednesday, chosen because they are considered vulnerable, included 16 children -- two of them disabled -- and a pregnant woman.
Tsipras, who was at Athens airport to see the 30 refugees off, said they were making "a trip to hope", but warned their numbers were nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands who have arrived on European shores this year.
"Today they have the opportunity to make a trip to hope, to a better life," said Tsipras, who was joined at the airport by Luxembourg's Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn.
"It's a drop in the ocean, but we hope the drop will become a stream and then a river of humanity."
He spoke as Fabrice Leggeri, the head of the EU's Frontex border agency, told Germany's Bild newspaper that migrants have made some 800,000 "illegal entries" to the bloc so far this year and warned that the influx has probably not "reached its peak".
In Germany, Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen announced that more than 6,000 soldiers have been mobilised to manage the influx into a country that is expected to take in up to a million asylum seekers this year.
This is more German troops than are deployed abroad, she noted.
- 'The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
is the gateway' -
"The human sacrifice that shames European civilisation must stop," said Tsipras, whose country saw more than 200,000 people land on its beaches in October alone, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR.
Tsipras said the registration and relocation process for refugees must begin in Turkey, insisting: "Greece is not the gateway; Turkey is the gateway."
Ankara's cooperation is seen as key to ending the crisis, with the EU last month announcing a refugee cooperation deal with Turkey that includes a possible three billion euros ($3.3 billion) in aid.
Two first groups of Eritrea
...is run by the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), with about the amounts of democracy and justice you'd expect from a party with that name. National elections have been periodically scheduled and cancelled; none have ever been held in the country. The president, Isaias Afewerki, has been in office since independence in 1993 and will probably die there of old age...
ns and Syrians left Italia under the relocation scheme last month, bound for Sweden and Finland, although some countries such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland still oppose the mandatory quotas. 
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