Rome - Two Syrian girls aged eight months and five years drowned along with four other people when a wooden boat carrying war refugees trying to make it to Europe capsized off the coast of Libya, a humanitarian rescue group said on Friday.
The bodies were recovered about 22 nautical miles from Libya on Thursday when the small vessel packed with 27 Syrians flipped over and sank, the Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) humanitarian group said.
The bodies of two women and one man were also recovered, while another person who was on the boat was not found, MOAS reported. MOAS operates two rescue boats in the Mediterranean Sea between Italy and Libya.
The media spotlight refocused on the plight of civilians in Syria's conflict this week following a wrenching video of a dust-covered, disoriented five-year-old boy, Omran Daqneesh, pulled from the rubble after a bombing raid in Aleppo.
More than 500 boat migrants were rescued from overcrowded and unsafe boats in seas between Libya and Italy on Thursday, including 146 people plucked from a semi-deflated rubber vessel, Italy's coastguard said.
Last year Syrian refugees bound for Europe tended to take a short boat ride to Greek islands from Turkey. But those routes have been largely shut down this year, forcing some to make the longer and more dangerous voyage from North Africa toward Italy.
Thousands of children have been killed in the Syrian civil war, now in its fifth year, and more than 3 000 migrants have died in the Mediterranean so far this year, the International Organization for Migration estimates.
About a quarter of all boat migrants in 2016 - some 100 000 have arrived in Italy - are children, the UN refugee agency says.
Reuters