Over 25,000 Egyptians' Returned From Libya This Week

Over 25,000 Egyptians returned from next-door Libya over the past week, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said on Friday.



The ministry said in a statement that 4,122 Egyptian nationals flew in from Libya over the past week.



It also said that 21,407 others crossed into Egypt through the northwestern Salloum border crossing during the same period.



Numerous Egyptian expatriates had fled crisis-hit Libya this month after Egypt launched a series of airstrikes against suspected Daesh sites in Libya's eastern city of Darnah.



Daesh is the Arabic acronym for the "Islamic State of Iraq and Levant" militant group, which last year overran vast swathes of territory in both Iraq and Syria and won the allegiance of several militant groups across the Middle East.



Egypt's airstrikes came one day after a video appeared online purportedly showing the execution of 21 Egyptian nationals by masked Daesh militants in Libya.



Last month, the Egyptian government – citing the country's precarious security situation – advised its citizens against travelling to Libya.



Fractious Libya has remained a source of concern for neighboring Egypt since it descended into violence and chaos following the ouster and death of strongman Muammar Gaddafi in late 2011.



Head of Egypt's official statistics agency Abu Bakr Abdel-Karim had told The Anadolu Agency earlier that there were no specific figures on the number of Egyptians living in Libya.



Unofficial estimates place the number of Egyptian expats in Libya between 100,000 and 1.5 million.



www.aa.com.tr/en - Kahire