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The child's mother and brother also drowned in Turkey
"Everything I was dreaming of is gone," says his father, Abdullah Kurdi
CNN
—
Aylan Kurdi’s last journey was supposed to take him to a safe home – hundreds of miles away from the relentless war in his native Syria.
Instead, it ended with a funeral for the 2-year-old in the city his family tried to flee.
Aylan’s body arrived in the Turkish city of Istanbul on Friday. From there, it made its final trip home to Kobani, the Syrian city his family left to escape the daily barrage of bombs.
The tiny boy with a cheeky smile may be gone, but the wrenching images showing his drowned body will live on.
The photos, which have galvanized the world and become the latest symbol of the migrant crisis in Europe, show his body lying on a Turkish beach. He’s wearing a red shirt and black shoes, his face partly covered by sand and gentle waves, as if he were sleeping.
Aylan, his brother, Galip, 4, and mother, Rehen, drowned trying to make that dream a reality. The children’s father, Abdullah Kurdi, survived, and accompanied their bodies to Kobani, where they were buried.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said as three coffins sat nearby. “I don’t know what to say.”
Kurdi said he will stay in the war-torn city where his wife and children are buried adjacent to one another.
Abdullah Kurdi says the trip from hell started when he boarded a small, overcrowded boat in Turkey with 12 people on board. It was manned by two smugglers: a Turk and a Syrian.
“I told him, ‘Should we empty the boat? Should I get off with my wife and child?’ ”
One of the smugglers replied, “‘No, no, it is good,’” he recounted.
As soon as the boat set out, large waves crashed against it. They pounded harder, forcing one smuggler to jump overboard and swim toward shore. Kurdi said he tried to take control of the boat, but it capsized in the rough waters.
“I tried to reach for my wife and children,” he said. “I was in the water for 20 minutes. One person after another was dying.”
Kurdi, who was trying to get to Sweden by way of Greece, described his life as hopeless without his family.
“I don’t want anything else from this world,” he said. “Everything I was dreaming of is gone. I want to bury my children and sit beside them until I die.”
Four Syrians are in custody on suspicion of human trafficking in the deaths.
Abdullah Kurdi’s sister had filed refugee paperwork to obtain permission for her family to live in Canada, but the application was rejected in June, Canadian Parliament Member Fin Donnelly told CNN partner CTV.
But Tima Kurdi, who lives in Vancouver, said the paperwork was for a different brother. The Department of Citizenship and Immigration Canada confirmed Thursday it never received an application for Abdullah.
Tima Kurdi said she knew of her brother’s plans to make the dangerous voyage, and has talked to him recently.
“He is so proud of his kids to be the wakeup call to the world,” she told CTV. “He is proud of them so it will be better for the other Syrians in desperate need.”
She said she sent him $5,000 Canadian dollars to pay for the trip and urged him to “make sure you buy a real life jacket and not a fake one.”
In one case last month, 71 bodies – mostly people who had fled Syria – were found in an abandoned truck in Austria.
A woman cries after being rescued in the Mediterranean Sea about 15 miles north of Sabratha, Libya, on July 25, 2017. More than 6,600 migrants and refugees entered Europe by sea in January 2018, according to the UN migration agency, and more than 240 people died on the Mediterranean Sea during that month.
Santi Palacios/AP
Refugees and migrants get off a fishing boat at the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey in October 2015.
Antonio Masiello/NurPhoto via ZUMA Press
Migrants step over dead bodies while being rescued in the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Libya in October 2016. Agence France-Presse photographer Aris Messinis was on a Spanish rescue boat that encountered several crowded migrant boats. Messinis said the rescuers counted 29 dead bodies -- 10 men and 19 women, all between 20 and 30 years old. "I've (seen) in my career a lot of death," he said. "I cover war zones, conflict and everything. I see a lot of death and suffering, but this is something different. Completely different."
ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images
Authorities stand near the body of 2-year-old Alan Kurdi on the shore of Bodrum, Turkey, in September 2015. Alan, his brother and their mother drowned while fleeing Syria. This photo was shared around the world, often with a Turkish hashtag that means "Flotsam of Humanity."
DOGAN NEWS AGENCY/EPA/LANDOV
Migrants board a train at Keleti station in Budapest, Hungary, after the station was reopened in September 2015.
Matt Cardy/Getty Images
Children cry as migrants in Greece try to break through a police cordon to cross into Macedonia in August 2015. Thousands of migrants -- most of them fleeing Syria's bitter conflict -- were stranded in a no-man's land on the border.
GEORGI LICOVSKI/EPA/LANDOV
The Kusadasi Ilgun, a sunken 20-foot boat, lies in waters off the Greek island of Samos in November 2016.
Alexis Malagaris/Samos Divers Association via AP
Migrants bathe outside near a makeshift shelter in an abandoned warehouse in Subotica, Serbia, in January 2017.
Srdjan Stevanovic/Getty Images
A police officer in Calais, France, tries to prevent migrants from heading for the Channel Tunnel to England in June 2015.
PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty Images
A migrant walks past a burning shack in the southern part of the "Jungle" migrant camp in Calais, France, in March 2016. Part of the camp was being demolished -- and the inhabitants relocated -- in response to unsanitary conditions at the site.
PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty Images
Migrants stumble as they cross a river north of Idomeni, Greece, attempting to reach Macedonia on a route that would bypass the border-control fence in March 2016.
Vadim Ghirda/AP
In September 2015, an excavator dumps life vests that were previously used by migrants on the Greek island of Lesbos.
Petros Giannakouris/AP
The Turkish coast guard helps refugees near Aydin, Turkey, after their boat toppled en route to Greece in January 2016.
Emin Menguarslan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
A woman sits with children around a fire at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni in March 2016.
Vadim Ghirda/AP
A column of migrants moves along a path between farm fields in Rigonce, Slovenia, in October 2015.
Darko Bandic/AP
A ship crowded with migrants flips onto its side in May 2016 as an Italian navy ship approaches off the coast of Libya. Passengers had rushed to the port side, a shift in weight that proved too much. Five people died and more than 500 were rescued.
Italian navy via AP Photo
Refugees break through a barbed-wire fence on the Greece-Macedonia border in February 2016, as tensions boiled over regarding new travel restrictions into Europe.
Pierre Crom/Getty Images
Policemen try to disperse hundreds of migrants by spraying them with fire extinguishers during a registration procedure in Kos, Greece, in August 2015.
Yorgos Karahalis/AP
A member of the humanitarian organization Sea-Watch holds a migrant baby who drowned following the capsizing of a boat off Libya in May 2016.
Christian Buttner/EIKON NORD GMBH GERMANY via AP
A migrant in Gevgelija, Macedonia, tries to sneak onto a train bound for Serbia in August 2015.
Boris Grdanoski/AP
Migrants, most of them from Eritrea, jump into the Mediterranean from a crowded wooden boat during a rescue operation about 13 miles north of Sabratha, Libya, in August 2016.
Emilio Morenatti/AP
Refugees rescued off the Libyan coast get their first sight of Sardinia as they sail in the Mediterranean Sea toward Cagliari, Italy, in September 2015.
Gregorio Borgia/AP
Local residents and rescue workers help migrants from the sea after a boat carrying them sank off the island of Rhodes, Greece, in April 2015.
ARGIRIS MANTIKOS/AFP/Getty Images
Investigators in Burgenland, Austria, inspect an abandoned truck that contained the bodies of refugees who died of suffocation in August 2015. The 71 victims -- most likely fleeing war-ravaged Syria -- were 60 men, eight women and three children.
Rex Features via AP
Syrian refugees sleep on the floor of a train car taking them from Macedonia to the Serbian border in August 2015. How to help the ongoing migrant crisis
ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images
Europe's migration crisis in 25 photos
Nearly three-quarters of the world’s migrant deaths this year have occurred in the Mediterranean, according to the organization. And the number of deaths in the region so far this year – 2,643 – is nearly 20% higher than last year’s 2,223.
Some have drowned, and others were crushed in stampedes or asphyxiated by boat engine fumes.
More than 350,000 people have arrived in Europe so far this year, seeking sanctuary from war, persecution or poverty.
Their arrival has sparked support in some areas across Europe and backlash in others.
Foreign Ministers Paolo Gentiloni of Italy, Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany and Laurent Fabius of France have presented the European Union with a joint document calling for a revision of asylum rules and a fairer distribution of refugees. No specifics have been provided.
“These people are forced to go on boats, they pay 4,000 or 5,000 euros and they die in these desperate circumstances,” said Antonio Guterres, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees. “This doesn’t make sense. We need to have a coherent response to this situation … only Europe as a whole, based on solidarity, can give that response.”
Aylan’s photo has sparked criticism of Europe for not doing enough to help the refugees and migrants escaping from Africa and the Middle East.
