Ankara: The image of a little boy lying face down on a beach may haunt us for the rest of our life as a reminiscent of the world's dead apathy towards the humanitarian crisis in Syria.
The little boy is among the 12 Syrian refugees, who died after a boat carrying them to the Greece capsized off near the coast of Bodrom in Turkey on Wednesday.
The picture released by Turkish news agency depicting the dark-haired toddler, wearing a bright-red T-shirt and shorts lying lifeless on the sand has gone viral on social media.
Turkish media identified the young boy as three-year-old Aylan Kurdi and it also reported that his mother along with his five-year-old brother also met with a similar fate.
A grim face police officer carries the lifeless body of a child after a number of refugees died and a smaller number were reported missing
The little boy reportedly hailed from the war-torn northern Syrian town of Kobani, a largely Kurdish-dominated region in northern Syria where Islamic state insurgents and Kurdish forces were engaged in intense gunfight earlier this year.
Greek authorities, facing what has become the biggest migration crisis in living memory, said the boy was among a group of refugees escaping Islamic State in Syria.
Aylan Kurdi, 3, (L) and his brother Galip, 5, who drowned along with their mother
Some 350,000 migrants have made the perilous journey to reach Europe's shores since January this year, according to figures released by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) on Tuesday.
The IOM said more than 2,600 migrants had drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean in the same period.
About 11 million people (half of Syria's population) have either died or fled their homes since the Syrian conflict began in 2011. About 4 million of that number have been forced out of the country.
