Posted on 09/03/2015 5:47:43 PM PDT by Kaslin
The father of a Syrian toddler whose body washed up on a Turkish beach says his boys "slipped away" from his hands after their rowboat capsized trying to reach the Greek island of Kos from Turkey with several other refugees.
"I was holding my wife's hand, my children slipped away from my hands," Abdullah Kurdi said in a statement to police obtained by the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet. "We tried to hold on to the boat. Everyone was screaming in pitch darkness. I couldn't make my voice heard to my wife and kids."
The death of Kurdi's three-year-old son, Alan, who drowned along with his brother, Galib, 5, and mother, Reham, has drawn worldwide attention to the Syrian refugee crisis and placed the Canadian government under fire after it emerged the family had been trying to come to Canada with the help of their aunt, Tima Kurdi.
Abdullah Kurdi spoke publicly for the first time Thursday after he identified the bodies of his wife and sons in a Turkish morgue and prepared to take them home to Syria.
Kurdi said he got on a boat with 13 people, including the man steering the boat. He said the boat was heavy in the water.
"We sailed in the sea for about four to five minutes," he said. "The man steering the boat saw that the sea was high, the waves were high.
"We were hit by the first wave and he jumped into the water and escaped away. I tried to take over the steering but we were hit by another wave. The boat capsized. I grabbed my children and my wife. But they died."
(Excerpt) Read more at ca.news.yahoo.com ...
Update on girl in photo as an adult.
The napalm was dropped by South Vietnamese forces.
However you are not alone in comparing the two photos.
U.K. Express: Will image of dead Syrian child define our era like Vietnam napalm girl?
Thanks for the information and up date. President Johnson was already gone by the time that photo was taken.
I can still visualise the utter weariness on his ageing face as he informed the American people he would not run for another presidency.
This particular man and his family had already safely escaped from the war in Syria, according to ALL of the various reporting.
What’s not clear, is why he decided it was suddenly time to risk his wife and children’s lives on an illegal human smuggler’s (AKA pirate) tiny unsafe boat, in order to illegally enter another country.
Maybe he trusted and believed them?
Who can forget that photo off the fleeing Vietnamese girl?
He's kind of weird
Because when people decide to commit a crime, they naturally look to much more experienced criminals for guidance.
I seriously doubt trust was a deciding factor.
Is this Kurdi . . . a Kurd? That would engage my sympathies more. But I do wonder about where the story came from.
I would observe that many so called refugees are really economic refugees. The European Union calls for the very first country they set foot on to do this. - That one country is the one that must document house and feed the new comers.
If that country has serious economic problems the new comers soon know. That country has it's own poor and needy, their own housing problems. Off the newcomers go to those countries where the system has a free ride. The newcomers are not stupid.
Just a statistic from Canada may be of interest. If a Canadian citizen had worked all their lives and did not have a civil service/industrial extra pension- sheer poverty. Total is two payments of about $1100 per month. A new "refugee" in Ontario gets the equivalent of $2,400 for starters.
Like I said the new "refugees" ain't stupid. Excuse my ramble. Have a great Labour Day weekend!
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