Some of the global media coverage focused on Canada’s role in the tragic death of Alan Kurdi, his five-year-old brother and his mother, details of which shifted over the course of the day.
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A photograph of the tiny body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, washed up on the shore, quickly became a viral symbol of the tragedy of refugees.
“I tried to catch my children and wife but there was no hope”, Mr Kurdi told the BBC’s Fergal Keane.
He said his children were only a few of the many victims of Syria’s four-year conflict and pleaded for a “solution to the tragedies” gripping his country.
“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“.
He says they have been trying to galvanize the Canadian public to pay attention to the refugee crisis happening in Europe, but it has not been easy. Shortly after their attempt to reach Greece the two boats they were in sank.
The Canadian Council for Refugees is calling for Syrians with family in Canada to be allowed entry immediately to complete processing in safety. When the boat flipped upside down and the waves keep pushing him down, those two boys, they were in his arms.
‘We tried to cling to the small boat, but it was deflating’. Abdullah wanted them all to escape the bloodshed, but now his wife and sons will lie amongst the ruins of their hometown.
The distraught father, who worked as a barber in Syria, added wistfully: “All I want is to be with my children at the moment”.
But the agency did receive an application for his brother, Mohammad Kurdi, and Mohammad Kurdi’s family “but was returned as it was incomplete as it did not meet regulatory requirements for proof of refugee status recognition”.
She said Mohammad couldn’t provide a Turkish document which was the equivalent of a work permit.
Rehan Kurdi and her sons Aylan and Galip, who fled the Syrian town of Kobani, were among 12 migrants who drowned when two boats carrying them from the Turkish coast to the Greek island of Kos capsized.
The three bodies were flown to a city near Turkey’s border with Syria, from where police-protected funeral vehicles made their way to the border town of Suruc and crossed into Kobani.
“We began a formal process to bring over all of my siblings and their families early in 2015”, she said in a statement from her home in Vancouver.
“Please let’s use our collective voices to make change and demand that our world leaders take action now to pass emergency refugee measures”.
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The migrant crisis has been escalating in Europe in recent months, with thousands of people paying large amounts of money to be smuggled across the Mediterranean Sea and into Europe, which is facing the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War.
