Little Aylan was one of 17 refugees from war-torn Syria who set off in a dinghy in a desperate attempt to reach the Greek island of Kos and safety.
Turkish media reported they were from the Kurdish town of Kobani in northern Syria, which has seen fierce fighting between bloodthirsty Islamic State militants and local Kurdish forces.
Aylan’s overcrowded dinghy overturned in the Aegean Sea and he drowned along with a dozen other frightened passengers, including his 5-year-old brother, Galip, and their mother, Rihan, 35, according to several published reports.
Their father reportedly survived.
None of them was wearing life jackets. And there was nothing the grim-faced Turkish police officer who found Aylan could do but gather the boy up in his arms and carry him off the beach.
The photo of Aylan rocketed around the world on Twitter bearing the hashtag, “KiyiyaVuranInsanlik,” Turkish for “humanity washed ashore.”
Two other brothers who were on the doomed dinghy also drowned — Zainb Ahmet-Hadi, 11, and his younger brother Hayder, just 9.
Their grief-stricken mother, Zeynep, clung to her surviving 7-year-old daughter, Rowad, at a Turkish hospital and wept bitter tears for her lost boys.
Some 11 million people — about half the population of Syria — have fled the country since fighting erupted in 2011, and more than 200,000 are believed dead.
This summer, tens of thousands of frightened refugees have descended on Turkey’s Aegean coast determined to make it to the nearby Greek islands — their gateway to the European Union.
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