The Road from Damascus
65 million people around the globe are stateless and seeking a new homeland
Abdullah Kurdi was displaced for a decade before he became the lightning rod for a story of our times.
Originally from Kobanê in northern Syria, he moved to Damascus a decade ago with his brother and father, where he settled in the mostly Kurdish neighbourhood of Rukn al-Din, on the slopes of Mount Qasioun.
Before he moved to Damascus, Abdullah was among the thousands of Syrian Kurds who had sought work in provincial towns and cities across the nation because of the poor job prospects in the country’s Kurdish regions.
But when the Syrian civil war began after the Arab Spring of 2011 his life in Damascus became perilous. Struggling to make a living amid the instability brought by the violent protests between the opposition and the Syrian government, he returned to Kobanê in 2012.[i]
There he married his cousin, Rehenna, and opened a barber shop, but struggled to earn a stable income due to the civil war’s draining effect on the economy. His income shrank to a fraction of what he made in Damascus, a challenge compounded by the birth of the couple’s first son, Ghalib.[ii] Unable to pay the rent, Abdullah was forced to close the shop only four months after its opening.
To make ends meet, he left his wife and baby son to take a job in a cement factory in Tal Abyad, a border town 70 km east of Kobanê. When government forces retreated from Raqqa at the end of 2012, the Islamist groups Ahrar al-Sham and al-Nusra Front took control of the strategic border town.
Abdullah was forced to flee again when al-Nusra thugs began persecuting Kurds in the town and its surrounding villages. Returning to Kobanê briefly, he then crossed the border alone into Turkey in search of work and safety from persecution.
He moved into a share-house in Istanbul and worked in a factory 25 km away but struggled to survive because of high commuting costs. He stayed for 18 months and returned to Kobanê every few months to see his family and pass over his tiny savings. During this time, the couple conceived their second son, Alan, who was born in August 2013.
In September of 2014, the situation in Kobanê worsened after the Islamic State militant group launched a major offensive on the city. Much of Kobanê was quickly overrun and Rehenna and her sons joined the hundreds of thousands of refugees that were forced to flee.
While most Kobanês fled to refugee camps in Suruc, close to Kobanê, Rehenna and her sons escaped to Turkey to join Abdullah in the Eyup neighbourhood of Istanbul. There the young family of four scraped by for a year, but their financial situation was precarious with Abdullah doing only odd jobs on building sites.
In good months, he could earn 800 Turkish lira but often much less. To ease their hardship, Abdullah’s sister, Tima, who had left Syria for Canada 20 years earlier, wired Abdullah 400 lira a month to pay the family’s rent.
With Tima’s encouragement, Abdullah and his brother Mohammed made their first effort to enter Europe at the beginning of 2015. Their plan was to make safe passage and then sponsor Rehenna and their children from there.
The brothers tried to cross the sea from Edirne in southwestern Turkey, but the mission failed when Greek border guards caught them and handed them back to Turkish border police.
After his brother, Muhammad, made a second, successful trip alone into Europe, Abdullah decided to try again. He paid a smuggler $4,000, which his sister had given him, to spirit his young family across the Mediterranean to the Greek island of Kos, and then perhaps to Canada where his sister had applied for their resettlement as refugees.[iii]
Like many of the 300,000 refugees who had fled to Europe by water that year, Abdullah and Rehenna knew some of the risks they faced and might have heard of the bodies and debris that were washing up on Turkish and Greek beaches.
But by that stage they felt they had no way to forge a better life than making a ten-minute boat ride across the water.
At 11pm on the evening of 1 September 2015, Abdullah and his family boarded a small, motorised inflatable dinghy on Turkey’s Bodrum peninsula. Sixteen people were in the dinghy, which was designed for a maximum of eight. It was one of two boats carrying 23 people that set off that night for Kos.
The water was calm when they set off, but everything changed only five minutes later. The skipper of the little inflatable saw the sea was too rough to make the crossing and tried to turn back.[iv]
He panicked when he saw the high waves and jumped into the sea, leaving Abdullah in charge of the steering. Moments later, the dinghy capsized and for the next three hours Abdullah tried to keep his wife and tiny sons afloat in the broiling water.
He thrashed in the darkness, shuttling between little Alan, then to Ghalib, and then to Rehenna. In later news reports, he described lifting his children onto the side of the dinghy and begging them to cling to the deflating vessel, but they slowly slipped from his grasp.[v]
Only Abdullah survived. Two-year-old Alan, five-year-old Galip and their mother, Rehenna, were among a dozen people who drowned that night in the black sea. The next morning images of Alan’s body, which was found washed ashore, flashed across the world.
Abdullah and his family are part of the biggest refugee crisis the world has seen since World War Two. In 2016, it was reported that 65 million people around the globe were stateless and seeking a new homeland.[vi] These individuals were forcibly displaced because of persecution, conflict, violence and human rights violations.
Abdullah fled persecution at home. He sought shelter on an island that didn’t want him, and his family died near the shores of a land that perhaps wanted him least of all.
In 2015, worsening conditions for refugees in Syria and the wider region saw a million refugees enter Europe with half this number coming from Syria alone.[vii] Nearly all came by sea and that year 3,692 men, women and children perished trying to make the fateful crossing.[viii]
By 2019, with Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, closing in on victory after an eight-year revolt, there were five million Syrian refugees spread across the Middle East and Europe. The regime’s use of torture, detainment and industrial-scale death camps means most exiled Syrians are unlikely to return home.[ix]
Aid organisations, NGOs and some nations, especially Germany, have opened their hearts and borders to the world’s 65 million stateless and homeless people, but too many have turned a blind eye.[x]
Even if all these people find a new home, they will probably never return to the land of their ancestry and their children and grandchildren will lose the stories and language and deep rootedness of home.
This is an edited extract from Dan Gaffney’s new book and podcast series, ‘Journey Home — Essays on Living and Dying’, published in November 2019.
[i] Fitzherbert, Y (2015). Abdullah Kurdi: The long return to Kobane. Middle Eastern Eye, September 8
[ii] Hopper, T (2015). The sad odyssey of Alan Kurdi and his family: Their search for new life ended in death. National Post, September 3
[iii] Glavin, T (2015). Why little Alan Kurdi and his family never really had a chance of reaching Canada. National Post, September 3
[iv] Kuntz, K (2015). ‘I Feel like I Am Dead’: Alan Kurdi’s Father Tells His Story, Der Spiegel, September 14
[v] Wikipedia (2015). Death of Alan Kurdi
[vi] UNHCR (2015). Global Trends Report: Forced Displacements
[vii] Australia for UNHCR (2015). Refugee Crisis in Europe
[viii] Associated Press (2015). Over 1 million refugees, migrants estimated to have entered Europe this year. December 22
[ix] Barnard, A (2019). Inside Syria’s Secret Torture Prisons: How Bashar al-Assad Crushed Dissent, The New York Times, May 11
[x] Shear, MD, Kanno-Youngs, Z (2019). Trump administration to push for tougher Asylum rules. The New York Times, April 9
