One Tragedy of Countless Others

"I started pushing them up to the surface so they could breathe. I had to shift from one to another. I think we were in the water for three hours trying to survive."
"The waves were high, the boat started swaying and shaking. We were terrified."
"I rushed to my kids and wife while the boat was flipping upside down. And in a second we were all drowning in the water."
Abdullah Kurdi, Syrian Kurd, 40, from Kobani

"I was trying to sponsor them, and I have my friends and my neighbors who helped me with the bank deposits, but we couldn’t get them out, and that is why they went in the boat."
"I was even paying rent for them in Turkey, but it is horrible the way they treat Syrians there."
Teema Kurdi, Vancouver, British Columbia

Originally from Kobani, the besieged Kurdish town just inside Syria across the border from Turkey, Mr. Kurdi who had paid smugglers thousands of dollars to take him and his wife and two young boys in a 15-foot boat to one of the Greek islands in a bid to find haven for his family in Europe, is now mourning the death of his wife and two children. The boat they were being transported in, along with another boat, was swamped by high waves, drowning 27 people.

Kobani is now back in the hands of the Syrian Kurds, but Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists still keep inflicting terror attacks on the partially destroyed town. Its residents who had fled in the initial attacks to refugee camps on the Turkish side in distant view of the destruction their town was undergoing, had to decide how their future would unfold; to return to Kobani and its unsettled status where violence and uncertainty prevails, or to look elsewhere for haven.

Mr. Kurdi had attempted to emigrate to Canada with his family. His sister has lived in British Columbia for years through earlier immigration, and has stated she made every effort open to her to sponsor the little family to join her in Canada. Now, Mr. Kurdi is desolate, alone without his family, completing paperwork in Mugla Province, Turkey, arranging for the bodies of his wife Rehan, 27, and their children Galip, 5, and Aylan, 3, to be returned to Kobani for a funeral and burial.
 


The body of the younger child, Aylan, three, was discovered on a Turkish beach.

A Turkish police officer carried the body of a young Syrian refugee who drowned off the coast of Turkey’s Bodrum Peninsula on Wednesday. Credit Nilufer Demir/DHA, via Reuters

In an interview, Mr. Kurdi spoke of the panic as the boat capsized, and his frantic efforts to save his wife and children. Attempting to keep all three afloat and alive until help might arrive, he watched as each of his children, exhausted, submitted to the waters, drowning. His wife had been holding on to the capsized boat, and he directed one of the children toward his mother "so he could at least keep his head up", but it was futile.

Turkish police detained four Syrians whom they suspect of having arranged the passage of the capsized boats. Mr. Kurdi's sister Teema had lived in Canada for several decades, and hoped she could aid her brother, sister-in-law and nephews to come to Canada as sponsored refugees. She is also attempting to sponsor another brother and his family. It seems that after a visa application for one of the brothers was rejected it was revealed the cause was that the United Nations had failed to declare the families to be refugees. Moreover the Turkish government had denied exit visas to the family.

"I am meeting with officials to ascertain both the facts of the case of the Kurdi family and to receive an update on the migrant crisis."

"The tragic photo of young Aylan Kurdi and the news of the death of his brother and mother broke hearts around the world. Like all Canadians, I was deeply saddened by that image and of the many other images of the plight of the Syrian and Iraqi migrants fleeing persecution at the hands of ISIS."
"We did not have an application from Abdullah and the children."
Chris Alexander, Minister of Immigration