Riot Police Evacuate Idomeni Refugee Camp
Hundreds of riot police have arrived at Greece's largest informal refugee camp to evacuate thousands of people.
The operation to clear Idomeni, on the Macedonian border, began at dawn with buses taking families and their belongings to a new camp near the northern city of Thessaloniki.
The camp, which sprung up at an informal pedestrian border crossing for refugees and migrants heading north to Europe, is home to an estimated 8,400 people - including hundreds of children - mostly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
At its peak, when Macedonia shut its border in March, it housed more than 14,000, but the numbers have declined as people realised the border was shut and began accepting authorities' offers of alternative places to stay.
Twenty buses carrying various riot police units were seen heading to the area while a police helicopter observed from above. An estimated 700 police are involved.
Police and government authorities say the residents will be moved to new official camps.
Most people in Idomeni have been living in small tents pitched in fields and along railway tracks, while aid agencies have set up large tents to help house and feed people.
Residents did not appear to welcome the clearance operation.
"It's much better here than in the camps. That's what everybody who's been there said," Hind Al Mkawi, a 38-year-old refugee from Damascus, said on Monday evening.
"I've heard (of the pending evacuation) too," she said. "It's not good ... because we've already been here for three months and we'll have to spend at least another six in the camps before relocation.
"It's a long time. We don't have money or work - what will we do?"
Abdo Rajab, a 22-year-old refugee from Raqqa in Syria, has spent the past three months in Idomeni, and is now considering paying smugglers to be taken to Germany.
Giorgos Kyritsis, a government spokesman for the refugee crisis, said the operation would last up to 10 days and that police would not use force.
Earlier this year Macedonian police used stun guns and rubber bullets to disperse hundreds of people who tried to scale a border fence in one of many clashes with the authorities.
More than 54,000 refugees and migrants have been trapped in financially struggling Greece since Balkan and European countries shut their land borders to a massive flow of people escaping war and poverty at home.
Nearly a million people have passed through Greece, with the vast majority arriving on islands from the nearby Turkish coast.
