‘They are all gone now’
Shattered Syrian dad recalls sinking ship’s final moments, how his wife and two kids ‘slipped from my hands’
He was only doing what he thought necessary to save his family.
But when the smuggler whom Abdullah Kurdi had hired to spirit them across a thin strip of the Aegean Sea to a Greek island panicked and jumped ship, it was the first sign that Kurdi may have led them instead to disaster.
“I took over and started steering. The waves were very high, and the boat flipped,” the dishevelled dad said in a flat voice tempered with shock.
“People panicked when water filled the boat and it sank,” he told the local press, according to the Washington Post. “We had life vests. I was holding my wife’s hands. My children slipped from my hands . . . We tried to hold on to the boat, but it deflated rapidly. Everyone was screaming.”
“I took my wife and my kids in my arms, and I realized they were all dead,” he said.
Kurdi told his harrowing story the day after a photo was taken of his 3-year-old son, Alan, drowned, face down in the sand on a Turkish beach. The image was instantly indelible.
It went viral online and was displayed on the front pages of newspapers around the world. Commentators made hopeful predictions that it would galvanize public opinion to help the hundreds of thousands of refugees making the perilous journey to Europe in the same way the photo of a naked Vietnamese girl being burned by napalm turned the tide against the Vietnam War.
Kurdi, like countless others fleeing the civil war in Iraq and Syria, had hired a smuggler to take his family from Bodrum, Turkey to the nearby Greek island of Kos. While only a few kilometres separate the two, the nighttime journey was derailed when wind and waves capsized their little boat.
“There were 12 of us, and it was overloaded. Counting the man who operated the boat, there were 13 of us,” Kurdi said. “We went into the sea for four minutes, and then the captain saw that the waves were so high, so he steered the boat, and we were hit immediately. He panicked and dived into the sea and fled.”
His wife Rehan and his 5-year-old son Ghalib also perished in the accident.
“My kids were the most beautiful children in the world, wonderful,” said Kurdi in a soft voice while standing outside the mortuary where his family lay. “They woke me up every morning to play with them. They are all gone now.”
The BBC and the AFP report that Kurdi worked as a barber in Damascus before his family was forced to flee the escalating civil war, first to Aleppo, then to Kobani, a key border crossing with Turkey. Then in 2012, the advances of the so-called Islamic State pushed them to cross the border and move to Istanbul. They reportedly arrived in Bodrum two weeks ago.
Like many refugees, Kurdi had family abroad. His sister, Tima, who has lived in B.C. since 1992, had always hoped to reunite the family and now despairs that it will never come to pass.
“I’m just worried about my brother right now. How he feels, I can’t even imagine. I can’t,” Tima said Thursday at an impromptu press conference outside her Coquitlam home.
“I don’t blame the Canadian government, I blame the whole world. My brother’s message to the world is to help those people crossing the water.” TIMA KURDI SISTER OF ABDULLAH KURDI, WHOSE WIFE AND TWO SONS DIED TRYING TO CROSS FROM TURKEY TO GREECE
“I can’t even imagine any father or any mother, their kids die in their arms, and they can’t do anything. I can’t even imagine,” she said.
The Vancouver branch of the family had been supporting Abdullah and Rehan in Istanbul, paying their rent and hoping to bring them over to Canada once an older brother, Mohammed, and his school-age children arrived first.
But after Mohammed’s application was rejected in June, Kurdi began preparations to enter the EU clandestinely. Tima sent $5,000 to pay the smugglers.
“Two days ago, my brother texted me and said, ‘we are leaving right now,’ ” she told reporters Thursday.
“It’s three, four o’clock in the morning in Turkey. So I passed the message to my dad in Syria, to my sister, everybody: ‘Abdullah is leaving now. Pray for him for safety.’
“And then we didn’t hear from him. His phone was off. That’s when we started to worry because it only takes half an hour to cross that water. So why (did) it take him two days and his phone is off? We don’t know,” she said. When Tima awoke Wednesday morning, she realized her family had been calling all night and immediately knew something was wrong. When she was finally able to get her brother on the phone, her worst fears were confirmed.
Local reports say 12 people died in the accident, eight of them children. Turkish authorities have arrested four people suspected of being intermediaries in the human-smuggling operation. While Tima’s husband blamed Canada’s asylum system that is “designed to fail,” she took a wider view of the plight facing the largest wave of refugees since the Second World War.
“I don’t blame the Canadian government, I blame the whole world,” she said. “My brother’s message to the world is to help those people crossing the water.
“I want everybody to hear me and go back, mostly in Turkey at Bodrum, where everybody is crossing, a million of them there, and just stop them. I don’t want any family to drown anymore. I don’t want to see it.”
Abdullah reportedly said he was offered Canadian citizenship after officials learned of his family’s fate, but the Canadian government has denied that any such offer was made.
Little does it matter, for Abdullah says he declined the offer. Instead, he plans to return to Syria with the corpses to make sure they get a proper burial.
“Now all I want to do is sit next to the grave of my wife and children.” With files from Jillian Kestler-D’Amours, Peter Edwards and Star wire services.