The haunting image of little Aylan Kurdi’s body lying face down in the sand of a Turkish tourist beach seared itself in the world’s collective conscience and sparked an outpouring of sympathy for the refugees fleeing the bloodbath of war-torn Syria.
The three-year-old’s unwitting legacy in the ten days since his drowning in the Aegean has been an unprecedented mass movement of tens of thousands of migrants towards Europe and joyful scenes of them being warmly welcomed to the ‘promised land’.
But as the emotion subsides, questions have begun to emerge not only about the status of many of the new arrivals in Europe but of the Kurdi family themselves.
The haunting image of Aylan Kurdi's body, pictured, provoked an outpouring of sympathy across Europe
Abdullah Kurdi, pictured here in Istanbul in August 2014, was able to enjoy the sights with his family
Before making the fateful journey, the Kurdi family lived in this little house in Istanbul, paid for by his sister
Are these refugees with a well-founded fear of persecution, unable or fearful of returning to their homeland, or simply economic migrants in search of a better life? Some reports yesterday went further – accusing Aylan’s 40-year-old father Abdullah of being one of the people traffickers, a claim he has vehemently denied.
The Mail on Sunday has retraced the steps of the Kurdi family from their origins in Syria to their tragic attempted journey to the Greek island of Kos in a 16ft boat, during which Aylan, his five-year-old brother Galip and his mother Rehan died.
We have spoken to the people who met them along the way and built up a remarkable picture of their situation while living in Turkey.
It is a moving story of hardship and deprivation and of course there is no happy conclusion. But once the family settled in Turkey nearly a year ago, could the Kurdis still truly be classed as refugees in the same plight as those sheltering in a dusty tented city?
And more importantly, could Mr Kurdi’s decision to risk all their lives in a hazardous sea crossing – something he once vowed never to do – ever be justified?
The first immense upheaval for the Kurdi family came in 2011, when they were bombed out of their home in the Syrian capital, Damascus.
After allegedly being tortured by the regime, Mr Kurdi fled 300 miles north-west with his wife and eldest son to their Kurdish home town of Kobane, where Aylan was born the following year. But life in the Euphrates valley town near the Turkish border was hard and, struggling to ply his trade as a barber, in the winter of 2012 Abdullah made the life-altering decision to travel alone to Istanbul, more than 800 miles away, where he started working in a sweatshop producing Islamic gowns
His job was to check the garments being produced by the dozen women using sewing machines to produce black robes in a humid haze for ten hours a day.
Like many Syrian refugees in Turkey, Mr Kurdi was effectively stateless with neither passport nor birth certificate and so denied a work permit. That defined his life in near-Dickensian terms and left him working for a pittance on the black market, earning only £5.50 a day.
Former colleagues said he told them he would never consider using people smugglers to reach Europe and beyond. ‘We were talking about it and he said, “I will never risk my family’s life doing that, it’s too dangerous”,’ said one, who declined to be named.
‘He wanted to go to Canada because his sister lives there. He was always preparing himself in his head to go to Canada and always rejected the idea of going by sea. He wanted to get his papers legally.’
The manager of the basement factory, a Turkish Kurd, said Mr Kurdi initially spent three nights living in a hostel with other Syrians which cost him double his daily pay.
‘He was losing money so I said to him you can stay with me and some of the other workers. Some nights he spent sleeping on the floor of the factory in his work clothes.
‘He would sleep in the kitchen and toilet area and sometimes in the corner in the office here.’ After a few months, Mr Kurdi returned to Kobane – a gruelling 20-hour bus journey – to bring his wife and children across the porous border to Istanbul and for three days they joined him sleeping on the floor of the factory’s fetid toilet before securing a tiny flat by using the name of his boss on the tenancy agreement.
Aylan, left, and his brother Galip both died when the boat they were travelling in capsized
But scraping together the £80 monthly rent while feeding his family was impossible on his meagre wages, and after four months, he reluctantly sent Rehan and the children back to Kobane.
For a further 18 months, he toiled alone in Istanbul, leaving the rag trade in September 2013 to tout for work on construction sites, earning about £8 per day. He was always homeless and slept on a succession of sofas at friend’s houses. Little by little, he was able to save a small amount of money.
A former colleague at the factory said: ‘He was really missing his family. He would be away from them for long stretches. He wanted to work hard but he also wanted to see his children. They were his world.’
The family was reunited again in October last year in Kobane – just as the Syrian civil war erupted in the city, with Islamic State terrorists laying siege to the town in fierce battles with Kurdish militia.
Mr Kurdi rescued his wife and children from the war zone and once again took them to Istanbul where, in November, he managed to use his savings to put down a £50 deposit to rent a small house in the district of Eyup. The Kurdis’ fortunes finally began to change for the better.
The prefab home – which The Mail on Sunday has found – was far from luxurious but for the first time in Aylan’s short life he was permanently living with his father.
The family slept in one room which had one double bed and two old tatty sofas.
Although the home had a large 32in television, there was no shower or bath and the toilet was a hole in the ground. They cooked on a single-hob camping stove.
Mr Kurdi’s sister Fatima was paying the £100-a-month rent by sending money from Canada and Turkish neighbours of the family say they appeared to be ‘happy and comfortable’ in their new home.
Most days the boys would wake up their father, begging him to play with them on their tricycle and other sit-on toys that he’d saved up to buy. Neighbours say they would run up to him shouting ‘Daddy’ and grab his legs when he returned home shattered from a long day’s labour.
At weekends, Mr Kurdi would join Istanbul’s tourists and take his boys on the ferry across the majestic Bosphorus strait to the Asian side of Istanbul for a treat.
All the while, he was saving for the dream move to Canada.
‘They were having a good life here in Turkey, I don’t know why they left,’ their landlady Mushreff Terregy, 66, said.
It is a question which has haunted all who knew the Kurdis. One significant factor may well have been the difficulties which would have lain ahead for Aylan and his brother in getting access to education or health care in Turkey, where their prospects as both Syrian refugees and Kurds were doubly blighted.
Zainab Abbas, pictured, whose two children also drowned said Kurdi was working with the people smugglers
Zanib, right, pictured with her husband Ahmed, lost two of their children, extreme left, during the crossing
And with no job security, it’s not difficult to see why Mr Kurdi would seek to emigrate.
Sitting on a stall in the front garden in the same spot where Abdullah was pictured proudly holding both his son’s hands in July, Ms Terregy added: ‘They were good tenants and a very loving family.
‘She was a wonderful woman and did a very good job looking after the boys. I loved them so much. They were very good people.
‘If I knew they were leaving to get a boat to Greece, I would never have let them go. It is too dangerous.
‘When they moved out on August 6, they said they were going back to Kobane to tend to olive trees they own there. I had no idea they were going to Bodrum.’ Zafer Bektars, a Turkish neighbour who said he helped fix the Kurdi family’s television earlier this year, said: ‘I am angry and sad.
‘Angry with him because of what he did and the risk he took and sad because those children were very little. They did not have to leave.’
But Mr Kurdi, speaking from Kobane, where he returned to bury his family said: ‘The house was in a worse situation than my previous house back home.
‘It wasn’t good enough to live in but I had no other option. I couldn’t handle working in Turkey because it was too hard to get by.
‘I love Turkey as a system and Istanbul as a city, but I couldn’t afford it.
‘If I wanted to take my children on the ferry trip, which they loved, I was worrying about the money that I’d spend.’
What made budgeting even harder was that Mr Kurdi had to spent around £1.50 each day buying special ointment to treat his children’s eczema, he said.
Mr Kurdi claimed he decided to take the dramatic step of using people smugglers after an application to migrate to Canada was rejected in June.
‘My main concern every day was to provide our daily food by finding work, that if I could find a job then we could eat. My sister helped me and wanted to take me and my brother Mohammad and his family to Canada. But the Canadian government rejected our request. So we decided to take the sea way.
‘We were living on a beautiful hope. All my life was devoted for these little children and wife and now it’s gone. It’s over.’
A spokesman for the Canadian government denied ever receiving an application for residency from Abdullah Kurdi.
Mr Kurdi last night denied claims he was a people smuggler and was driving the boat which capsized off the coast of Bodrum.
Iraqi mother Zainab Abbas, 32, whose own two children also drowned, said Mr Kurdi was taking a cut of the money her family had paid for the perilous crossing.
He said: ‘I don’t know why she is saying this.
‘Why would a people smuggler take his family on the same boat? Why would I be living in such a poor house in Istanbul if I was earning lots of money as a smuggler?’ Four men have been charged in connection with the deaths but Mr Kurdi has not faced any police action.
As the exodus from Syria goes on, the Kurdis have been swiftly replaced as tenants by another couple from the country who fled Aleppo with their seven-year-old son.
Aylan and Galip’s toys remain eerily on display in the house.
The mother, who asked not to be named, said: ‘When we came here Aylan’s tricycle and his happy birthday decoration was still here.
‘We hadn’t got round to moving them and now we are not going to remove them in memory of them.’
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