Advertisement

Father of drowned refugee boy photographed on beach describes boat's sinking

 
Three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, left, and his 5-year-old brother Galip Kurdi drowned off the coast of Turkey on Wednesday. [Photo courtesy of Tima Kurdi  | Canadian Press via AP]
Three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, left, and his 5-year-old brother Galip Kurdi drowned off the coast of Turkey on Wednesday. [Photo courtesy of Tima Kurdi | Canadian Press via AP]
Published Sept. 3, 2015

ISTANBUL — The little boy on the beach had a name, and it was Aylan.

Searing images of the Syrian toddler's drowned body, washed ashore after the raft carrying his refugee family capsized off the Turkish coast, pricked consciences worldwide and galvanized passionate debate over the international response to the enormous tide of migrants arriving on Europe's shores.

On Thursday, a day after photographs of the then-anonymous child lying dead in the surf went viral online — his small pale face slightly turned to one side, his rump-up posture achingly familiar to the parents of any napping toddler — a fuller portrait emerged of a family rendered desperate by fighting in their hometown, Kobani, and their slender hope of finding refuge in Canada.

The family was called Kurdi, and relatives said 3-year-old Aylan, sometimes called by the Kurdish variant Alan, drowned along with his 5-year-old brother, Galip, and their mother, Rehan. The child's father, Abdullah, survived to break the terrible news by phone to family members at home and abroad, plunging even their loss-racked hometown in northern Syria into mourning.

Abdullah Kurdi spoke with Turkish journalists in Bodrum, the resort town where the bodies washed up.

"My kids were the most beautiful children in the world, wonderful. They wake me up every morning to play with them," he said. "They are all gone now."

Describing the tragedy to the journalists, Abdullah Kurdi said the overloaded boat flipped over moments after the captain, described as a Turkish man, panicked and abandoned the vessel, leaving Abdullah as the de facto commander of a small boat overmatched by high seas.

"I took over and started steering. The waves were so high and the boat flipped. I took my wife and my kids in my arms and I realized they were all dead," he said.

In a police statement later leaked to the Turkish news agency Dogan, Abdullah Kurdi gave a different account, denying that a smuggler was aboard. However, smugglers often instruct migrants that if caught they should deny their presence and it was unclear whether he had been trying to protect a smuggler's identity in his statement to police.

The distraught father, who worked as a barber in Syria, added wistfully: "All I want is to be with my children at the moment."

Abdullah Kurdi said the boat, headed for the Greek island of Kos, was only at sea for four minutes before the captain abandoned the vessel and its 12 passengers.

The route between Bodrum in Turkey and Kos, just a few miles, is one of the shortest from Turkey to the Greek islands, but it remains dangerous. Hundreds of people a day try to cross it despite the well-documented risks.

A Canadian legislator said the Kurdi family had been turned down in a bid for legal entry to Canada even though it had close relatives there offering financial backing and shelter, but Canada's Department of Citizenship and Immigration later denied that assertion.

Keep up with Tampa Bay’s top headlines

Keep up with Tampa Bay’s top headlines

Subscribe to our free DayStarter newsletter

We’ll deliver the latest news and information you need to know every morning.

You’re all signed up!

Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.

Explore all your options

"There was no record of an application received for Mr. Abdullah Kurdi and his family," the department said in a statement, indicating that a bid for another member of the family, Mohammad Kurdi, had been returned as incomplete.

The plaintive photograph of lifeless Aylan Kurdi, seen around the world, has highlighted the desperation of those risking their lives to try to reach Europe, sparking fresh calls for countries to do more to ease their passage. He said the boat filled with water soon after launching.

"We had no life vests," the Dogan news agency quoted him as saying. "People panicked when water filled the boat and it sank. My children slipped from my grasp."

He wants to take his family home to Kobani for burial, he said.

Three years ago, the family had fled dangerous Kobani, the town along Syria's border with Turkey that leaped to global prominence last year as an emblem of the menace posed by the Islamic State group. Kurdish defenders, aided by U.S.-led airstrikes, drove back the besieging militants in January, but Islamic State fighters later infiltrated the outskirts of town and killed scores of people in chilling house-to-house executions before again being repelled.

Aid workers, even those faced daily with harrowing scenes of hardship, groped for words to characterize Wednesday's tragedy at sea, in which 12 people were thought to have drowned. Yet such sinkings have become commonplace; more than 150 people drowned off the coast of Libya last week.

"It is unacceptable that we have children dying like this in the 21st century," said Lado Gvilava, the Turkey chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration. "It's hard to see how this can be allowed to happen."

Turkish social media users were the first to sound the alarm over Wednesday's disaster. After Dogan published pictures of a Turkish paramilitary policeman coming upon Aylan's body and then gingerly carrying him away with latex-gloved hands, the Turkish-language hashtag #KiyiyaVuranInsanlik ("Humanity washes ashore") became a world trending topic on Twitter.

The horrific nature of the images sparked debate about whether disseminating them on social media or in print was an affront to the dignity and privacy of those involved. Many of those who retweeted or posted the photos online said they had hesitated for those reasons and more, but were driven by an overriding sense of calamity unfolding before their eyes, albeit virtually.

Some sought to counter the ghastly beach scene by posting photos of Aylan and his brother Galip in life. One widely circulated picture showed the toddler with a gap-toothed grin, a giant teddy bear nestled between him and his smiling brother.

But for many, the indelible image of the little drowned boy — clad in blue shorts, a red T-shirt that bunched up around his waist, and shoes with Velcro fastenings rather than shoelaces he was too young to tie — evoked, to an almost unbearable degree, thoughts of their own children and the larger tragedy Aylan represented.

"I thought long and hard before I retweeted the photo," wrote Peter Boukaert, whose work with Human Rights Watch has taken him to the front lines of the refugee crisis.

"What struck me the most were his little sneakers, certainly lovingly put on by his parents that morning as they dressed him for their dangerous journey," Boukaert said in a blog post on his group's website. "One of my favorite moments of the morning is dressing my kids and helping them put on their shoes. . Staring at the image, I couldn't help imagine that it was one of my own sons, lying there drowned on the beach."

Abdullah Kurdi, aware of the worldwide impact of his family's tragedy, told journalists in Bodrum he hoped some good could come of it.

"We want the world's attention on us, so that they can prevent the same from happening to others," he said. "Let this be the last."

Information from Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press was included in this report.