Yannis Behrakis / Reuters
Algeria has abandoned more than 13,000 people in the Sahara Desert in the past 14 months, including pregnant women and children, stranding them without food or water and forcing them to walk for miles in one of the world’s least hospitable environments. It is not known how many people have died on the journey, but survivors told the Associated Press many people in their groups could not go on, dealing with temperatures of 118 degrees Fahrenheit. “Women were lying dead, men... Other people got missing in the desert because they didn’t know the way,” said Janet Kamara, who gave birth to a stillborn baby during the ordeal and had to leave it buried in a shallow grave in the sand. Algeria’s mass expulsions have picked up since October 2017, when the European Union increased pressure on North African countries to temper numbers of migrants going north to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea. Algeria provides no figures for the expulsions, but the International Organization for Migration had counted a total of 11,276 men, women, and children who survived the march since October 2017.