Image of Drowned Syrian Boy Echoes Around World

His name was Aylan. He was 3 years old, from war-torn Syria.

His final journey was supposed to end in sanctuary in Europe; instead it claimed his life and highlighted the plight of desperate people caught in the gravest refugee crisis since World War II.

The images of the toddler’s lifeless body on a Turkish beach have reverberated across the globe, stirring public outrage and embarrassing political leaders as far away as Canada, where authorities had rejected an asylum application from the boy’s relatives.

The child pictured facedown in red T-shirt and shorts was identified as Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian Kurd from Kobani, a town near the Turkish border that has witnessed months of heavy fighting between Islamic State and Syrian Kurdish forces.


He drowned after the 15-foot boat ferrying him from the Turkish beach resort of Bodrum to the Greek island of Kos capsized shortly before dawn on Wednesday, killing 12 passengers. Aylan’s 5-year-old brother, Galip, and his mother, Rehan, were also among the dead. His father, Abdullah, was the only family member to survive.

Photo Goes Viral

On Thursday, a distraught Mr. Kurdi, 40, told reporters he was preparing to take the bodies back to Kobani for burial and would stay there.

“From now on, I will live (in Kobani) too. I want to be buried with my family,” he said outside the morgue in the nearby town of Mugla.

Mr. Kurdi brought his family to Turkey three years ago after fleeing fighting first in Damascus, where he worked as a barber, then in Aleppo, then Kobani. His Facebook page shows pictures of the family in Istanbul crossing the Bosporus and feeding pigeons next to the famous Yeni Cami, or new mosque.

From his hospital bed on Wednesday, Mr. Kurdi told a Syrian radio station that he had worked on construction sites for 50 Turkish lira (roughly $17) a day, but it wasn’t enough to live on. He said they depended on his sister, Tima Kurdi, who lived in Canada, for help paying the rent.

Ms. Kurdi, speaking Thursday in a Vancouver suburb, said that their father, still in Syria, had suggested Abdullah go to Europe to get his damaged teeth fixed and find a way to help his family leave Turkey. She said she began wiring her brother money three weeks ago, in €1,000 ($1,100) amounts, to help pay for the trip.

Shortly after, she said her brother called her and said he wanted to bring his whole family to Europe, as his wife wasn’t able to support their two boys alone in Istanbul.

 “If we go, we go all of us,” Ms. Kurdi recounted him telling her. She said she spoke to his wife last week, who told her she was scared of the water and couldn’t swim.

“I said to her, ‘I cannot push you to go. If you don’t want to go, don’t go,’” she said. “But I guess they all decided they wanted to do it all together.”

At the morgue, Mr. Kurdi described what happened after they set off from the deserted beach, under cover of darkness.

“We went into the sea for four minutes and then the captain saw that the waves are so high, so he steered the boat and we were hit immediately. He panicked and dived into the sea and fled. I took over and started steering, the waves were so high the boat flipped. I took my wife in my arms and I realized they were all dead.”

Mr. Kurdi gave different accounts of what happened next. In one interview, he said he swam ashore and walked to the hospital. In another, he said he was rescued by the coast guard.

 “My kids were the most beautiful children in the world,” he said outside the morgue. “They woke me up every morning to play with them. They are all gone now. Now all I want to do is sit next to the grave of my wife and children.”

In Canada, Ms. Kurdi said her brother had sent her a text message around 3 a.m. Turkish time Wednesday confirming they had set off. The next time she spoke to him, he was in shock, telling her how he fought vainly to keep his two boys alive in the water, one tucked under each arm.

“They screamed ‘Daddy, please don’t die,” she said he told her. One by one, as he realized they were dead, he closed his eyes and let go, she said.

“He said, ‘I did everything in my power to save them, but I couldn’t,’” she said. “My brother said to me, ‘My kids have to be the wake-up call for the whole world.’”

 Mr. Kurdi said he had paid smugglers some €4,000 for safe passage to Greece. Turkish news agencies reported Thursday that police had detained four Syrians suspected of involvement in arranging the boat.

Across the world, news organizations published a variety of iterations of the image of the boy, with many expressing editorial outrage at the perceived inaction of developed nations to help refugees.

The focus of Canada’s national election campaign shifted Thursday to the country’s response to the migrant crisis, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper defending his government’s track record on refugee issues and pledging to do more.

Canadian media had cited Ms. Kurdi in Wednesday reports saying Aylan’s family had applied to immigrate to Canada, but she said on Thursday that the application was for another brother, Mohammad. That application was rejected because “it did not meet regulatory requirements for proof of refugee status recognition,” Canada’s immigration department said.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey—which has taken 1.7 million of Syria’s estimated 4 million refugees—castigated Europe for what he said was its failure to address the migration wave and the conflicts behind it.

He accused the European Union of bickering over distribution of immigrants while much poorer nations like Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon take in millions of refugees from Syria, Iraq and beyond.

“The European nations that have turned the Mediterranean into a grave for immigrants share the sin for each immigrant’s death,” Mr. Erdogan said. “It is not only immigrants who are drowning in the Mediterranean, it is also our humanity.”

In the U.K., where the government is facing mounting calls to offer more asylum spots for refugees, an online petition urging Prime Minister David Cameron to accept more asylum seekers surged to more than 300,000 signatures from 40,000 a day earlier.

Mr. Cameron said he was “deeply moved” by the photos of the deaths and pledged to fulfill Britain’s “moral responsibility.” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the images showed the need for urgent action by Europe.

Morning television shows across Europe were already comparing the image’s power to Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1972 photograph of a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl running naked, suffering agonizing burns from a napalm attack.

Nilufer Demir, the photographer from Turkey’s Dogan News Agency who captured the pictures of Aylan on the beach, said her “blood froze” when she saw the body.

“The only thing I could do was to make his scream heard,” said Ms. Demir, who has been photographing immigration since 2003. “I hope something changes after today.”

Karen Leigh in Dubai and Emre Peker in Ankara contributed to this article.
Also read the article in the Washington Post.