The last Syrian refugees to enter Macedonia before the Balkan route shut down are being transferred to emergency shelters after three days stuck in muddy no-man's land, the UN refugee agency said Thursday.
More than 400 refugees -- half of them children -- have been stranded in a field at the Macedonia-Serbia border after movement froze up along the main migrant path from Greece to western Europe.
"These refugees, 90 percent of whom are Syrians, were not allowed into Serbia, but then the Macedonian authorities did not let them come back," Ljubinka Brasnarska, a spokeswoman for the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) told AFP by phone.
"So they were stuck for three days in the open air in a muddy field in rainy and very cold weather."
Some of the children had subsequently caught respiratory infections, she said.
The group of 437 refugees was on the last train of migrants to cross Macedonia before the Balkans route closed down.
Macedonian authorities, under pressure from UNHCR, began transferring the group into four large tents in the nearby village of Tabanovce on Thursday evening, Brasnarska said.
According to an AFP photographer, the refugees had earlier erected about 120 small tents of various colours in a muddy field at the border, warming themselves by lighting fires.
Around a dozen police officers were deployed on each side, preventing them from setting off in either direction.
In Tabanovce, a separate reception centre is at full capacity with around 1,000 refugees, including 500 Afghans, who were refused entry into Serbia before the route shut down.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants have travelled through the Balkans to reach western Europe since last year, but Slovenia and Croatia barred entry to transiting migrants from Wednesday.
The border closures have created a huge bottleneck on the Greece-Macedonia border, where thousands are stuck.
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