‘We want to live in peace’: Father of drowned boy Alan Kurdi urges halt to foreign interventions

The refugee crisis the world has experienced recently is a result of the foreign interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere, Abdullah Kurdi, a refugee who lost his entire family as they were fleeing Syria, told Ruptly.

"I call on these countries that are supporting wars and providing arms to stop doing that, we want to live in peace," Kurdi said. He also expressed his hope that his native Syria “will become a better place and these wars will stop in all the countries so that people will stop leaving like I did."

Kurdi’s wife and two sons drowned when the rubber boat, in which they sought to reach Greece with 13 other refugees, capsized off the Turkish coast. The image of his 3-year-old son Alan, whose body washed up on the Turkish shore in September 2015, has provoked an international outcry and became a symbol of the refugees’ plight, prompting the EU to open its borders to people fleeing the Syrian conflict.

Kurdi also lamented the death of a girl from El Salvador, who drowned in the Rio Grande alongside with her Father on their way to the US.

"The image of the girl who sank in the Mexican river made me remember what happened to my child,” he said. “In the last four years, there were lots of tragedies related to children and it makes me cry, it reminds me of my kid.”

The father, who still struggles to overcome the tragic loss of his loved ones that makes him “cry every day,” added that he and his family had no other choice but to flee from what he called the “inhumane tragedy” his country has gone through.

“Nobody will feel that, only the people who lived it,” Kurdi told Ruptly.

Yet he advised other refugees and migrants embarking on perilous journeys in an attempt to find better future somewhere away from home against taking such a risk, as the price could be too high.

“I have faced the danger. My family is gone. I have a message to those who want to take the risk as I did. I tell them not to do it, because it's indescribable.”

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