Five years of upheaval: the story of Alan Kurdi’s family

When Alan Kurdi's tiny body washed up on a beach in Turkey, forcing the world to grasp the pain of Syria's refugees, the two-year-old was just one member of a family on the run, scattered by nearly five years of upheaval.

As a Turkish officer lifted the boy from the shallow waves at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, one of Alan's teenage cousins was alone on a bus in Hungary, fleeing the draft back home in Damascus. An aunt was stuck in Istanbul, nursing a baby, as her son and daughter worked 18-hour shifts in a sweatshop so the family could eat.

Dozens of other relatives had fled the war in Syria or were making plans to flee. And just weeks after Alan's image shocked the world in September, another aunt prepared to do what she had promised herself to avoid: set sail with her four children on the same perilous journey. "We die together, or we live together and make a future," her 15-year-old daughter said, concluding, as have hundreds of thousands of other Syrians, that there was no going back.

Alan, whose mother and brother drowned with him, belonged to a sprawling clan from Syria’s long-oppressed Kurdish minority. But for most of his closest relatives, that identity was secondary to the cosmopolitan ethos of the Syrian capital, Damascus, where they grew up. They barely spoke Kurdish, identified mainly as Syrian and joined no faction.

So when war broke out, and political ties, sect and ethnicity became life-or-death matters, they were on their own. Interviews with 20 relatives, in Iraqi Kurdistan, in Istanbul, in five German towns and by phone in Syria, tell a story of a family chewed up by one party to the Syrian conflict after another: the Syrian government, Islamic State, neighboring countries, the West.

Since Alan's death, at least 100 more children have drowned in the Mediterranean. A million refugees and migrants entered Europe this year, half of them Syrians, part of the dispersion of a country where half the population has fled. Alan's father, Abdullah (39) sometimes blames himself, wishing he could turn back time and not get on the boat. He was trying to steer it in the chaos when it foundered in the waves. But even for Abdullah's sister Hivrun, grieving her nephew, the calculus remained in favour of risking her children to save them. Weeks after Alan died, she tried again to start for Germany. Once again, she and her children clambered on to a rubber raft.

Kurdish Roots

Alan’s grandfather was born in Kobani, a mostly Kurdish enclave near the Turkish border in the north. After compulsory army service, he moved to Damascus looking for work and settled in the mostly Kurdish neighbourhood of Rukineddine, on the slopes of Mount Qasioun. He opened a barbershop and married a Kurdish woman who considered herself above all Damascene.

They had six children. They remember living modest lives not much affected by tensions between the government and Kurds. They spent the summers harvesting olives in Kobani, but saw themselves as city kids. Most left school after ninth grade to learn the family’s barbering trade.

Fatima, the eldest daughter, was the first to emigrate. In 1992, she moved to Canada to marry an Iraqi Kurd. They soon divorced, and she raised their son. Working nights in a printing plant, she caught the attention of a kindly boss. "She said, 'Every night I'll teach you 10 English words,'" Fatima recalled recently. "The rest I got from watching 'Barney' with my son."

English led to a hairstyling license, jobs at high-end salons and citizenship – successes that made the family’s later journeys possible. A commanding presence, Fatima became her siblings’ source of advice, information and emergency cash. When war broke out, she became their fiercest advocate.

Government crackdown

The ripples of conflict reached Damascus in spring 2011, just as Abdullah Kurdi was starting a family with his wife, Rihanna, a cousin from Kobani. As the protests, inspired by other Arab uprisings, began to spread against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, Rihanna headed to Kobani to give birth to Ghalib, Alan's older brother. Abdullah went back and forth, working in the family's Damascus barbershop.

Some of the Kurdis sympathised with the initially peaceful demonstrations, but most avoided involvement. The government cracked down across Syria, and the neighbourhood quickly came under pressure. Security forces, always able to detain people at will, became jumpier, quicker to scapegoat Kurds or anyone without political connections.

At first, the problems were strictly economic. Kobani offered few jobs. Abdullah went to Istanbul to work, while his wife raised Ghalib, and later gave birth to Alan. A sister-in-law, Ghousoun, and her family lived for a time in a sheep stable; she made money by bringing clothes from Damascus to sell.

Then a new threat arose. The extremist Islamic State group – also known as Isis – split from others fighting Assad, declared a state, and preyed on Kurds and other minorities. Ghousoun’s travels grew perilous. Her accentless Arabic and conservative dress hid her Kurdishness at Islamic State checkpoints, but made her suspect at Kurdish roadblocks.

Islamic State

By September 2014, Islamic State was shelling Kobani. Word came that the militants would invade. Families fled toward Turkey. The family spent days looking for a crossing, with hundreds of other Kurds. Finally, the group tried to breach the border. The Turkish police beat most of them back, but a Kurdish woman on the Turkish side hid Ghousoun's family in her cowshed.

Back in Kobani, the Kurdi clan’s olive groves were burned, houses destroyed, and 18 relatives slaughtered. Many of the survivors made it to Istanbul, and a new round of ordeals. Abdullah had managed to send money from Istanbul by working, and sleeping, in a clothing workshop. But when his wife and children finally joined him, he said, the burden overwhelmed him. The only apartments he could afford were so far from his work that he had to quit his job, instead lifting 200-pound bags of cement, making $9 per 12-hour day.

Ghalib and Alan jumped into his bed each morning to snuggle before he slathered them with ointment for their eczema, a ritual that he relished, even as he fretted over the cost of the balm. “They sat in the house all day,” he said, choking with tears. “The only thing they were waiting for was me.”

Paradise

Hivrun and her husband were the first to take their whole family to sea. They took their four children and an adult nephew south to Izmir, the epicentre of the smuggling trade in Turkey. Smugglers packed them in windowless vans, left them alone in a wooded area to dodge the police, then put them on a raft aimed at a Greek island a few miles off, but the raft had a broken engine. Only when Hivrun objected was the trip aborted.

On the next try, they were out to sea when water started rushing in. Hivrun saw a Turkish coast guard boat and shouted for help, not stopping even when other passengers, who preferred to risk it, angrily shushed her. Hivrun's husband and the older children wanted to try again. Hivrun refused. She took the children back to Istanbul, and her husband and nephew sailed off to Greece.

Soon afterward, Abdullah tried the voyage with his family. “We had decided to go to paradise,” Abdullah explained, a better life, whether in Europe – or the hereafter. Hours after Alan’s drowning, Abdullah told the story in anguish: The small boat foundered and flipped a few minutes into the journey. He tried to hold on to Ghalib and Alan, calling to his wife, “Just keep his head above water!” But all three drowned, one by one.

In the news media blitz that followed, Alan’s aunt in Canada, Fatima, leapt into action. From her home near Vancouver, she took calls from the news media, blaming Canada’s red tape and the world’s indifference. Soon she was touring Europe to advocate on behalf of refugees. “Those kids were born when the war was on,” she recalled telling António Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees. “And they die with the war still on.”

Her raw message helped spur Western countries – briefly, at least – to open their doors to Syrians. But none of that changed the calculus for the Kurdis.

A few weeks after the tragedy, Abdullah sat, angular and stiff and out of place, on a sofa in the piano bar of a gilt-trimmed hotel in Irbil, in Iraq’s Kurdistan region. The sea had sheared him of all trappings of identity: his documents, his sisters’ phone numbers, even his dentures.

“I have become a shadow,” Abdullah said. After he buried his family in Kobani, in three graves on a treeless plain, he was whisked to Irbil by the powerful Barzani clan. He had resolved to use the spotlight on his grief to aid other Syrians, and the Barzanis were promising help.

Barely understanding Kurdish, he went gamely to meetings with the rich and powerful, and delivered aid to refugee camps, happiest when playing with children. But he often seemed dazed. He called his Canadian sister, Fatima, who was collecting his family’s things in Istanbul. She was coming to see him, and the thought of it brightened him. He asked her for his sons’ favourite stuffed dog, the one with the tongue sticking out, or maybe the Teletubby doll with the missing eye that he had promised to fix.

“I want something,” he said, “with their smell.”

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