His wife and sons were among 12 people to die after two boats capsized while trying to reach the Greek island of Kos from Turkey.
Two young Syrian brothers and their mother who drowned while trying to reach Greece were buried on Friday in their home town of Kobani and their distraught father begged Arab countries to do more to help Syria's refugees.
Images of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, washed up dead on a Turkish beach, shocked the world this week, giving a human face to the large-scale refugee disaster unfolding across Europe and prompting both empathy and outrage over the perceived failure of rich, developed nations to protect such vulnerable people.
Abdullah
Kurdi, the boys' father, wept as he watched Aylan's tiny body being
placed into a coffin. It was afterwards lowered into the ground, along
with those of his brother Galip, 5, and their mother Rehan, 35, in the
'Martyrs' Cemetery' in Kobani, a mainly Kurdish town in northern Syria
near the Turkish border.
"I want Arab governments - not European countries - to see (what happened to) my children, and because of them to help people," he told reporters earlier at the border crossing as ambulances ferried the three bodies from Turkey into Syria.
The ambulances drove past sobbing mourners, Kurdish flags, and Kobani's shelled-out buildings towards the cemetery.
The United Nations
refugee agency estimates more than 300,000 people have used dangerous
sea-routes so far this year to reach Europe, with around 2,500 losing
their lives.
Many of those refugees have fled
Syria's four-year civil war, in which more than 250,000 people have been
killed and some 11 million -- half of the country's population --
driven from their homes.
Of those displaced, some four million have fled abroad, mostly to neighbouring Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.
Abdullah
has said he decided to try to reach Europe with his family after Canada
-- where his sister lives -- rejected his application for asylum.
His
wife and sons were among 12 people to die after two boats capsized
while trying to reach the Greek island of Kos from Turkey.
Abdullah said on Thursday he wanted the world to take action to ensure that his children were the last to die in such a way.
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