Short dinghy trip turned tragic,

Grieving father recounts harrowing events of the night he lost his family at sea

Under cover of darkness on a warm night, Abdullah Kurdi, a Syrian refugee, and his family prepared for the final leg of a dangerous journey he hoped would finally take them to safety.

Abdullah, a barber by trade, his wife and two sons, waded out into the water and climbed into a rubber dinghy with 12 other refugees. Their launch spot was the seaside town of Akyarlar, on the Bodrum peninsula on Turkey’s southern coast. Their destination: the Greek island of Kos, just four kilometres away.

Abdullah’s youngest son, Alan, 3, was wearing a bright red T-shirt, blue shorts and Velcro shoes.

Both he and his 5-year-old brother, Ghalib, were wearing life-jackets.

The family had come all the way from war-torn Kobani, a town on the Syria-Turkey border 1,300 kilometres away that was the scene of fierce fighting between Islamic State extremists and Kurdish forces earlier this year.

This wasn’t their first attempt to cross the Aegean Sea to Kos. Despite the hazards, the route is popular among desperate refugees because it is one of the shortest between Turkey and the Greek islands and smugglers reportedly charge $800 to $1,000 a person. On a clear day, you can see Kos in the distance from Akyarlar, its lighthouse a beacon in the night. Freedom and safety have never seemed closer.

Shortly into last Tuesday’s journey, however, disaster struck. Waves overcame their boat, prompting Abdullah to ask the smuggler if they should turn back. “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,’ ” Abdullah later recounted, according to reports.

Then, as the waves pounded harder and higher, the smuggler jumped overboard and swam toward shore, leaving Abdullah in charge. “I took over and started steering. The waves were so high and the boat flipped,” he later told police.

Abdullah tried to hold on to his two young sons as he clung to the side of the upturned dinghy. But high waves swept away the boys, who lost their life-jackets in the water, along with his wife, 35-year-old Rehan. “I was holding my wife’s hand. My children slipped away from my hands. We tried to hold onto the boat,” he said in a statement to police. “Everyone was screaming in pitch darkness. I couldn’t make my voice heard to my wife and kids.”

A horrified barman working at a resort in Bodrum came across Alan, still dressed in his shorts, T-shirt and shoes, early Wednesday morning. He called authorities, but it was too late.

Abdullah will never know how long it took for Alan, Ghalib and his wife to drown, their final words and thoughts, or how much they suffered.

But his son has become a tragic face of the suffering and deaths of all Syrian refugees. (The bodies of Abdullah’s wife and Ghalib were also recovered in Bodrum.)

The tragic images and footage of Alan’s tiny body being carried from the beach by Turkish gendarmerie have been shared across social media, prompting global outrage over the refugee crisis, which has now reached epic proportions.

At least 2,500 people have died this year trying to reach Europe by sea, many of them Syrians. The number of Syrians forced to flee since civil war broke out in March 2011 has now reached the two million mark, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Half are children like Ghalib and Alan.

“Syria is hemorrhaging women, children and men who cross borders often with little more than the clothes on their backs,” said UNHCR’s Antonio Guterres. “It is a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled in recent history.”

Only the truly desperate would get into a rubber dinghy at night and head out to sea. But plenty do. The beach around Bodrum is covered in debris and deflated dinghies, photographs, medicine, shoes, rope and other personal belongings — evidence of this and other tragedies.

Now, Abdullah just wants to fly back to Kobani and bury his family members. “I don’t want anything else from this world,” he told CNN on Thursday. “Everything I was dreaming of is gone. I want to bury my children and sit beside them until I die.” With files from Star wire services