THEY SLIPPED FROM MY HANDS
Agony of drowned boys’ father
THE heartbreaking images of their bodies symbolise the horror of the refugee crisis.
But, for their griefstricken father, the deaths of Aylan and galip Kurdi are a personal tragedy.
Sobbing uncontrollably, Abdullah Kurdi yesterday recalled his terror when a flimsy and overcrowded dinghy capsized and his wife and children vanished beneath the Mediterranean waves.
his sons, who were just five and three, slipped from his grasp in pitch-black waters off Bodrum in Turkey. With the night air pierced by the screams of his fellow Syrian refugees he tried in vain to save wife rehan.
‘I was holding her, but my children slipped through my hands,’ he said.
‘We tried to cling to the boat, but it was deflating. It was dark and everyone was screaming. I could not hear the voices of my children and my wife.’
over the following three hellish hours in the water, Mr Kurdi battled for survival, while frantically searching for his sons and his wife, who had also been pulled from his reach. he found one child but it was too late – the boy had drowned.
‘My first son died from the high waves,’ he said. ‘I was obliged to leave him to save the other one. I tried to swim to the beach by following the lights.
‘I looked for my wife and child on the beach but couldn’t find them. I thought they had got scared and had run away and I went back to Bodrum.
‘When they did not come to our meeting
point I went to the hospital and learned the bitter truth.’
The barber had paid people smugglers £2,900 over the course of three attempts to reach Greece from a refugee camp in Turkey.
But he has told friends he wished he had also drowned to be spared a lifetime of self-recrimination over the family’s desperate gamble for a better life. Pictures of Aylan and Galip have been shared by social networkers around the world, prompting calls for politicians to do more for fleeing Syrians.
Aid agencies have been inundated with donations and offers of help. They have even taken calls from families offering to take desperate refugees into their homes.
Mr Kurdi told the Daily Mail: ‘I wanted a better life for them, that’s why I left. I just hope that this photo of my son changes everything.
‘We want the world’s attention on us, so that they can prevent the same from happening to others. Let these be the last things that happened to us here, in the country where we took refuge to escape war in our homeland. We want the whole world to see this.’
The Kurdi family had hoped to move to Canada but their application to live there had failed.
It was sponsored by Mr Kurdi’s sister Teema, a hairdresser who lives in Vancouver.
At a press conference last night she revealed her sister-in-law did not want to make the crossing.
She said: ‘His wife told me on the phone a week ago “I am so scared of the water. I don’t know how to swim, if something happens … I don’t want to go”.
‘But I guess they decided they wanted to do it all together.
‘Those two kids – they didn’t see a good life at all. They didn’t deserve to die.’
Canadian immigration authorities rejected the Kurdis’ application in part because of the family’s lack of exit visas to ease their passage out of Turkey.
The government also objected to their lack of internationally-recognised refugee status, the aunt told the Ottawa Citizen. Chris Alexander, the country’s immigration minister, yesterday suspended his re-election campaign to travel to Ottawa and look into why officials rejected the request.
Family pictures of the boys on Facebook made an unbearably poignant contrast with the images of their bodies, washed on to the beach at Bodrum.
Smiling and laughing, they were hand in hand with their father or cuddled up together with a soft toy. As he prepared to take his family’s bodies back to Syria for burial, Mr Kurdi said he could not face trying to build a life in Europe without them.
Instead the ethnic Kurd will return to his former home in the border town of Kobane, despite it being under constant threat from Islamic State extremists.
‘All I want is to be with my children – they were the most beautiful children in the world,’ he said.
‘Is there anybody in the world for whom their child is not the most precious thing? They woke me every morning to play with me. Now everything is gone.’
Mr Kurdi and his wife Rehan, 35, fled Damascus in 2012, first for Aleppo and then Kobane. Three- year-old Aylan had spent his entire life on the move as his family fleed from fighting in their homeland. Friends said they endured shelling in Kobane before leaving last year as IS forces were poised to seize the town.
Mr Kurdi said he had worked as an odd-job man and sold the family’s belongings in the streets in a bid to fund their dream of a new life in either Canada or Europe.
But once in Turkey, the family hit a bureaucratic dead end because they were Kurds.
In desperation, they turned to the people smugglers. Coastguards intercepted their boat on their first attempt to reach the Greek island of Kos. The second time round the traffickers failed to show up at the rendezvous point.
Mr Kurdi said a Turkish smuggler started the third voyage with him and other Syrians with whom he had obtained the boat.
They had been at sea for only four minutes when the dinghy began taking on water.
‘The captain saw that the waves were so high and as he tried to steer the boat we were hit immediately,’ said Mr Kurdi. ‘He panicked and dived into the sea and fled.
‘I took over and started steering, but the waves were so high that the boat flipped immediately.
‘I took my wife and my kids in my arms. Now all I want is to lie in a grave next to them.’
Mr Kurdi broke down after seeing his sons’ bodies in the morgue, running from the building and crying out ‘My God, my God’.
Three coffins were later loaded into a white ambulance to be flown to Istanbul and to the Syrian border. Funerals are due to be held in Kobane today.
Residents in Bodrum said the discovery of bodies on the beach was a grim daily reality. At the city’s state hospital, director Orhan Yuce said seven children were drowned on the night Aylan and Galip died. ‘We see this every day. It breaks my heart,’ he said.
‘It’s got so much worse this year. Hundreds of people. Every day. We have no idea of the real numbers – all we know is those who are washed up on our shores. It’s terrible. All these lives must not be forgotten.’
Save the Children said the images of Aylan and Galip had made a huge impact on public opinion. ‘This image has put a human face on this tragedy that’s been mired in statistics so far,’ said Gemma Parkin, a spokesman for the charity. ‘When you think about it in the context of it being your child perhaps, I think that’s where the tide of public opinion is turning.’
Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency said four suspected people smugglers were detained yesterday on suspicion of acting as interme-
‘I want to lie in a grave next to them’
diaries in trafficking. A barman told last night how he pulled the lifeless body of Aylan from the sea at Golden Beach, Bodrum.
Adil Demirtas, 18, who works at the Woxxie hotel, says he saw the toddler’s body with that of a little girl, in pink trousers, when he arrived at work.
Mr Demirtas was preparing the bar for tourists when a colleague shouted out pointing to something in the shallow water. he said: ‘I ran toward it and saw them. I was so afraid. he helped me pull them out of the water.
‘They looked still alive, like they were sleeping, smiling a little. Their faces and arms and legs looked so new still. They couldn’t have been in the water an hour. Their eyes were open. I closed them softly.
‘I can’t eat anything. I couldn’t sleep last night. I kept thinking about the two children.’