A lifeless toddler is carried across a tourist beach by a Turkish guard yesterday (inset top), his tiny body a heart-rending symbol of the human cost of the refugee crisis engulfing Europe. Further along the shore, the grim-faced officer retrieves another body (main picture), that of the toddler’s five-year-old brother, from the water’s edge. The pair were washed ashore after their parents’ desperate gamble on reaching the EU failed.
The images, some showing the brothers lying face down on the beach at Bodrum, immediately became a symbol of the migrants’ tragedy as they were shared across the world on Twitter. At least 13 people drowned when two dinghies (bottom inset) carrying refugees from Syria capsized in the Mediterranean, where more than 2,500 migrants have perished this year.
The brothers, named locally as three-year-old Aylan Kurdi and his brother Galip, were on an overcrowded boat which sank just 30 minutes into the 13-mile journey from Bodrum to the Greek island of Kos.
Heartbreaking: The bodies of Aylan, three (left) and his brother Galip, five (right) washed up on the shores of the Mediterranean. This photo shows the boys when they were younger, according to a Syrian journalist
Smiles: Galip and Aylan Kurdi (pictured) hail from the ISIS-besieged Syrian city of Kobane. According to relatives, their father now wants to return their to bury the two boys and their mother
The human cost: A policeman on a Turkish beach gently recovers the bodies of two brothers drowned as their family tried to make their way to the Greek island of Kos yesterday
Devastating: The two boys’ mother also drowned in one of the most harrowing episodes of the migrant crisis
The young boy, named as Aylan Kurdi, is just one of almost 3,000 migrants who have already died this year in the Mediterranean
The bodies of the brothers washed up on a beach in Turkey after the boat they were travelling in capsized
The route between Bodrum and Kos is one of the shortest from Turkey to the Greek islands and thousands of people are boarding rubber dinghies and attempting the perilous sea crossing despite the risks
Two boats capsized off the Turkish coast and the refugees’ belongings washed up on a beach in Bodrum
A migrant is pictured washed up on the sand at a beach in Bodrum, which is popular with tourists
Grieving Zeynep Abbas Hadi, another mother who lost two of her three children, was tended to by hospital staff
Zeynep Abbas Hadi’s surviving daughter Rowad comforts her outside Bodrum state hospital following the death of two of her children
Perilous trip: Although only 13 miles from Bodrum, Turkey, to the Greek island Kos, it is still a dangerous trip
