The photograph of Tima Kurdi’s nephew is perhaps the picture that the western world will remember most from 2015. The image of Alan, a two-year-old Syrian refugee, lying face down on a Turkish beach in early September is what woke the west to the urgency of the Syrian refugee crisis. Tima herself, however, still can’t bring herself to look at it for long: it was she who scrabbled together the money for Alan and his family to make the ill-fated journey that drowned the toddler, his brother and their mother.  “I cannot look at that picture,” says Tima. “It just breaks my heart, the way he was lying down. I don’t know how to describe it. He is desperate. He has no idea what’s around him. He has nobody.”  Turkish military policeman Mehmet Çıplak was the first person to find Alan’s body, and his voice still shakes when he remembers what happened next. “I checked for a signal of life, hoping he was still alive,” says Çıplak. “I was so sad. I am a father first. I have a six-year-old son. I empathised, I put him in my son’s place. There was an indefinable pain. Beyond being a military police officer, I behaved as a father.”  Çıplak had no idea that both his and Alan’s picture were about to be splashed across hundreds of international newspapers. “When the picture was online and then was on international press, my wife, my family, my colleagues called me,” remembers Çıplak. “They realized my face was in the pictures and they asked me: ‘How did you carry that burden?’”  It’s a burden that Tima Kurdi still carries: every day, she partly blames herself for what happened. A Kurdish hair-stylist, she moved to Canada in 1991, saying goodbye to four brothers and sisters in Syria. Twenty-four years later, the Syrian war forced her siblings to flee to Turkey, where refugees cannot work legally. Tima’s income kept all four families afloat, but her brother Abdullah was still living in poverty – prompting his decision to take Alan, his other son Ghalib and his wife, Rehanna, to Europe. “It wasn’t enough,” Tima says of her donations. “And that’s the guilt that will always follow me. It just breaks my heart. Every day I say: I wish I had sent them more food.”  Abdullah, meanwhile, has been taken in by the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani, and is in an even worse state. “Abdullah appears normal on the outside,” says Tima. “But on the inside, he’s been dead for a long time. He needs time.”  The family derives some catharsis from the impact the photograph had on policy and public opinion in Canada and abroad. Since Alan’s family had fled to Turkey, deemed a safe country, Canadian laws at the time made it almost impossible for them to qualify for asylum in Canada. The storm that followed Alan’s death prompted the then-Conservative government to remove some of the legal obstacles. It also helped shape the more humane approach of the new Liberal government that came to power after October’s election. Under its new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, Canada has begun to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees, the first tranche of whom were greeted personally by Trudeau at the airport.  “Absolutely Alan’s death did change the way the government looked at refugees,” says Tima. “They opened their eyes and they felt they have to do something about it. Our new government, when they said they would take 25,000, it was beautiful to see that. Canada is so big, and they could take more. But 25,000 is not bad either. When I was watching the news, and how our new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was welcoming them – I was in tears. It was very emotional for me. It was beautiful. He is a good guy. He has a good heart. He thinks about it as a human being.”  By contrast, Tima is left almost speechless by the actions of Donald Trump, the US presidential wannabe who has called for all Muslims to be barred from entering the country. “Trump is just … to be honest there is no word for him,” says Tima. “Absolutely there is no word. He’s done this for attention. He wants attention. And he has no knowledge beyond his luxury life.”  Related: The photographs that moved the world to tears – and to take action | Sean O’Hagan  More generally, Tima hopes her nephew’s story will help the western world understand why so many Syrians are fleeing from Turkey, even though they are no longer in a war zone. Most of them, like Abdullah, are not allowed to work legally, so they’re forced into an unsustainable cycle of exploitative work on the black market. Abdullah worked in construction and in a clothes factory to try to earn a living – but sometimes he wasn’t paid at all. At one point, he, Rehanna and their two sons would sleep in the toilet of a factory because they had nowhere else to live. “That’s not just the story of my family – the world has to wake up and see how everybody is living,” Tima warns.  “Don’t concentrate only on my family. Why are thousands of other Syrians in Turkey also so desperate? Why do they want to leave?”
The aunt of the Syrian boy photographed lying dead on a Turkish beach and the policeman who found him speak about the image and the plight of refugees