Suruc (Turkey) : The father of a drowned Syrian toddler whose fate shocked the world returned home to bury his family as European ministers tried to thrash out differences on binding refugee quotas to ease the crisis.
Britain said it would take thousands more from refugee camps on the Syrian border as the heartbreaking images of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body on a Turkish beach ramped up pressure on political leaders to act.
His father Abdullah Kurdi — who has told how Aylan and his other young son Ghaleb “slipped through my hands” when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea — arrived in the Syrian flashpoint border town of Kobane with the funeral caskets of his sons and wife, who also died.
“As a father who lost his children, I want nothing for myself from this world. All I want is that this tragedy in Syria immediately ends,” he said on his way to Kobane, which was devastated in clashes between Islamic State militants and Kurdish fighters. A divided Europe faces growing international criticism over its response to Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II, during which more than 350,00 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean, and around 2,600 people have died.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres warned that the EU faced a “defining moment” after little Aylan’s death and called for the mandatory resettlement of 200,000 refugees by EU states.
With tensions growing, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande said yesterday they had agreed the EU should now require member states to take in a fixed number of migrants.
EU foreign ministers were to discuss the crisis, which has split the bloc between countries like Germany advocating greater solidarity and mainly eastern nations such as Hungary that have taken a hardline approach.
Disagreements are rife over Europe’s piecemeal migration system and its passport-free Schengen area. EU rules that asylum claims must be dealt with in the country they first arrive were thrown into turmoil by Germany, which said it will refrain from deporting Syrians.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has proposed quotas for resettling a total of 160,000 refugees across the EU to take the pressure off the overstretched frontline states of Greece, Italy and Hungary.
The Hague : Charities aiding refugees witnessed a surge in donations across Europe today as people shocked by the heart-rending images of a drowned Syrian boy on a Turkish beach dug deep to help. British Prime Minister David Cameron, under pressure to act, said Britain would provide an extra $ 100 million (137 million euros, $153 million) in humanitarian aid for the Syrian crisis, bringing London’s total contribution to more than 1.0 billion pounds. The International Olympic Committee launched an emergency two-million-euro ($2.2 million) fund, as money flooded into the coffers of aid organisations helping those fleeing Iraq and Syria. The photos of the lifeless body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, dressed in blue shorts and a red T-shirt, washed up on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey, have triggered a wave of emotion across the continent, despite deep divisions among European governments about how to deal with the crisis. “There is an enormous response from the public, the tide of indifference is shifting,” Christian Peregrin, spokesman for the Malta-based Migrant Offshore Aid Station, told AFP.
Ankara : The photographer who shot the heart-wrenching picture showing a Syrian toddler’s lifeless body washed ashore Turkey’s Aegean coast said she was “petrified”, the media reported. “At that moment, when I saw Aylan Kurdi, I was petrified,” said Nilufer Demir, a photo-journalist covering the migrant crisis for Turkey’s Dogan News Agency (DHA), adding that she had no other option then to do her duty as a journalist. Demir clicked the picture on Wednesday at around 6:00 a.m., on Bodrum’s Akyarlar coast of Mugla province, where bodies of migrants washed ashore after two inflatable boats sank, Hurriyet news agency reported.
