Stories of 2015: how Alan Kurdi's death changed the world

he 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.”