As new details emerge about the young Syrian boy, now identified as three-year-old Aylan Kurdi—who drowned along with his mother, Rehan, and older brother, Galip, while the family attempted to cross the sea from Turkey to Greece on Wednesday—the global impact of the pictures has perhaps fulfilled the “sorrowful” hopes of the photographer who took the images in order to “make heard his outcry.”
It has now been reported that the father, Abdullah Kurdi, was the only member of the family of four to survive when the boat they and other refugees were traveling in capsized off the Turkish coast. In all, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency, 12 people drowned when two boats attempting to reach the island of Kos capsized. Eight of the 12 were children. The news agency subsequently reported that several individuals had been arrested on smuggling charges related to the incident.
Other new information includes how the Kurdi family—which had fled their war-torn hometown of Kobani to reach safety—had been sponsored by a relative for asylum in Canada, but that the application had been rejected.
“I heard the news at five o’clock in this morning,” Teema Kurdi, Abdullah’s sister, told the National Post on Wednesday. Teema described how the telephone call came from Ghuson Kurdi, the wife of another brother, Mohammad. “She had got a call from Abdullah, and all he said was, my wife and two boys are dead.”
According to the Post:
Teema, a Vancouver hairdresser who emigrated to Canada more than 20 years ago, said Abdullah and Rehan Kurdi and their two boys were the subject of a “G5” privately sponsored refugee application that was rejected by Citizenship and Immigration in June, owing to the complexities involved in refugee applications from Turkey.
The family had two strikes against them – like thousands of other Syrian Kurdish refugees in Turkey, the UN would not register them as refugees, and the Turkish government would not grant them exit visas.
“I was trying to sponsor them, and I have my friends and my neighbours 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 said.
Just over twenty-four hours after his tragic and untimely death, the emotional power of the images of Aylan’s lifeless body have become undeniable.
As the Wall Street Journal notes, broadcast shows across Europe on Thursday “were already comparing the image’s power to Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1972 photograph of a nine-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 haunting photographs, described the scene on the beach by saying she was “petrified” by the moment but took the pictures to fulfill her role as a journalist and make an attempt to give the young boy some kind of voice.