‘The world has let us down’
AS three-year-old Aylan Kurdi was laid to rest with his mother and five-year-old brother, Ghalib, on Friday, his father told fellow mourners: “I advise you not to leave your homes . . . The world has let us down.”
Pictures of little Aylan’s body lying on the beach touched hearts around the world this week.
The family had been trying to reach the Greek island of Kos from Turkey when the three drowned. Abdullah Kurdi had been on the smugglers’ boat with his children when it capsized. They slipped through his hands as he tried to save them. Aylan’s last words were: “Daddy, please don’t die.”
On Friday, back in his home town of Kobane in Syria, Abdullah warned fellow Syrians not to risk the lives of loved ones in attempting to flee the country.
Speaking at the funerals of the two boys and their mother, Rehana, Abdullah blamed the international community for its failure to protect civilians caught in the nation’s bitter civil war. He also told mourners: “I don’t blame anyone else for this. I blame myself. I will have to pay the price for this for the rest of my life.”
More than four million people have fled Syria in the four and a half years since the war between President Bashar al-Assad’s government and rebel forces began.
Kobane residents said the Kurdi family had joined the exodus from the region after Islamic State forces besieged the town last year.
Meanwhile, Austria and Germany threw open
I don’t blame anyone else for this. I just blame myself. I will have to pay the price for this for the rest of my life
their borders to thousands of exhausted migrants yesterday, bused to the Hungarian border by a right-wing government that had tried to stop them, but was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers reaching Europe’s frontiers.
Left to walk into Austria, rain-soaked migrants were whisked by train and shuttle bus to Vienna, where many said they were resolved to continue on to Germany.
German police later said the first 2 000 of a possible 10 000 migrants expected to reach Bavaria yesterday had arrived on special trains in Munich from Austria. Police in Austria said many thousands would pass through during the day, highlighting the continent’s worst refugee crisis since World War 2.
“It was just such a horrible situation in Hungary,” said Omar, arriving in Vienna with his family and hundreds of other migrants who poured out onto a fenced-off platform and were handed food, drinks and other supplies.
In Budapest, almost emptied of migrants by nightfall on Friday, the main railway station was again filling up with newly arrived migrants, but trains to western Europe remained cancelled.
So hundreds set off on foot, saying they would walk to the Austrian border just as others had tried to do on Friday.
In Greece a newborn boy was found dead after his migrant parents reached the shores of an island in a boat from Turkey yesterday, while new scuffles broke out between thousands of migrants and police on another Greek island.
The baby was taken from the island of Agathonisi to a hospital on the nearby island of Samos, where he was pronounced dead, the Greek coastguard service said.
Greece is struggling to cope with a wave of migrants and refugees from the war in Syria who are making the short crossing from Turkey to its eastern islands, including Kos, Lesbos, Samos and Agathonisi. Thousands are waiting to be identified and ferried to Athens to continue their trip to other European countries.
A Greek ferry unloaded 2 500 migrants at the port of Piraeus yesterday, bringing the total number of people moved to the country’s mainland since last Monday to 13 373, the coastguard said.
Yesterday Finland’s millionaire prime minister, Juha Sipila, said he would make his home in the north of the country available to refugees from early next year. —