Britain said it would take thousands more from refugee camps on the Syrian border as the heartbreaking images of three-year-old <g data-gr-id="16">Aylan</g> Kurdi’s lifeless body on a Turkish beach ramped up pressure on political leaders to act.
His father Abdullah <g data-gr-id="18">Kurdi</g> –who has told how <g data-gr-id="19">Aylan</g> and his other young son <g data-gr-id="20">Ghaleb</g> “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 <g data-gr-id="21">Aylan’s</g> 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 on Thursday they had agreed the European Union should now require member states to take in a fixed number of migrants.
30 migrants feared drowned off Libya
At least 30 migrants are feared to have drowned off Libya after their dinghy began to sink, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said on Monday.
Some 91 survivors rescued by the Italian coastguard yesterday said the boat had been carrying between 120 and 140 people when it began to deflate, sparking panic and tipping some people overboard. “As often happens, the dinghy, which had been inflated on the beach (of Misrata) just before departure, quickly began to deflate,” IOM spokesman Flavio Di Giacomo said.
“People panicked, they all rushed to one side of the dinghy. Many fell in the water, some drowned while others managed to pull themselves back on board,” he said.