Heartbreaking images that emerged Wednesday of a drowned Syrian toddler’s body on a Turkish beach went viral, shared by thousands of social media users around the world.
The 3-year-old boy and his 5-year-old brother were reported by Turkish media to have been among 12 refugees who drowned when their boat apparently capsized while trying to make the short but treacherous journey to the Greek island of Kos.
Photos carried by Turkey’s Dogan news agency showed the child face-down in on the beach, wearing a red T-shirt, blue shorts and sneakers with Velcro closings, and subsequently a Turkish police officer cradling the small corpse.
Europe is coping with an enormous human wave of refugees, many of them from Syria, and images of recent days have shown people struggling through gaps in border fences, sleeping in train stations or trudging wearily through fields. And the world was horrified last week by news that the decomposing bodies of 71 migrants had been found in a truck on a roadside in Austria, apparently suffocated.
But even against this backdrop of dramatic suffering, the dead toddler’s photo struck a nerve.
Turkish media quoted a senior Turkish naval official as saying that two boats carrying 23 people had set off separately toward Greece from the Akyarlar area of the Bodrum peninsula.
The confirmed dead included five children and one woman, while seven others were rescued and two reached shore in lifejackets, according to Today’s Zaman newspaper.
The naval official said a total of 13 migrants have died in the area over the past two days attempting to reach Kos, while 457 have been rescued.
The small boy in the photos was one of six people from the Syrian city of Kobani, according to the Dogan agency.
About 2,000 people per day are making the short crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands, with thousands more crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa. European Union states report more than 500,000 migrants and refugees have crossed the Mediterranean so far this year, and 2,600 of them have died trying to make it.
Turkish officials have criticized European nations for failing to deal appropriately with the crisis.
“European countries’ worrying approach to the flow of migrants has caused sorrow and it has been evaluated that the issue should be taken up in a basic human rights perspective, Turkey’s National Security Council said in a statement, according to Reuters news agency.
Turkey is presently hosting more than 1.9 million refugees from Syria.
