Toddler buried by distraught father
KOBANE: The father of a three-year-old Syrian boy whose drowning off Turkey shocked the world buried his son, another child and his wife in an emotional funeral here on Friday.
Local journalist Mustefa Ebdi said three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, his four-year-old brother Ghaleb and their mother Rihana were buried in the Martyrs’ Cemetery in the Syrian-Kurdish border town.
The father, Abdullah Kurdi, “looked broken and numb” as he addressed a large gathering, said Mr Ebdi who attended the service.
Abdullah Kurdi urges Arab states to find solution to Syrian crisis
“I don’t blame anyone else for this. I just blame myself,” the devastated father told mourners. “I will have to pay the price for this the rest of my life.”
He said his children were only a few of the many victims of Syria’s four-year conflict and pleaded for Arab countries in particular to find a “solution to the tragedies” gripping his country.
Relatives of the Kurdi family gathered in Kobane as a gaunt Abdullah carried the bodies of his young children to the cemetery, a photographer said. There, he laid the tiny body of Aylan, wrapped in a snow-white shroud, into a small grave dug in the red-brown earth.
The two children and their mother drowned off the Turkish coast on Wednesday while trying to reach Europe across the Aegean Sea.
A photograph of tiny Aylan’s lifeless body on the beach at Bodrum caused a global outcry.
The boy’s name “Aylan” translates to “symbols” in the Kurdish language, Mr Ebdi said. “Everyone was very sad and crying,” he said.
He said he told Abdullah “the world is standing with you”, but the grief-stricken father said he had nothing left in the world to live for. “What do I want with the world? I’ve paid the highest price,” Mr Ebdi quoted Abdullah as saying.
The father arrived earlier on Friday at the family’s ancestral home of Kobane from Turkey. A car carrying him and three coffins crossed the border into war-torn Syria, along with several members of Turkey’s parliament.
Published in Dawn, September 5th, 2015
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