Family of drowned Syrian boy to arrive in Canada as refugees

Relatives of a Syrian boy whose lifeless body was photographed on a Turkish beach are expected to land in Vancouver this morning to begin a new life.

Kurdi’s brother Mohammad, his wife and five children will move into the Kurdi home in Port Coquitlam after spending more than two years in Turkey after fleeing Syria. Tima Kurdi is opening a hair salon in Port Coquitlam, B.C., called Kurdi Hair Design, where she will work alongside Mohammed, who ran a barbershop in Syria.

Tima and Mohammed’s three-year-old nephew, Alan Kurdi, drowned along with his five-year-old brother and their mother while crossing the waters between Turkey and Greece in September. “If a person shuts a door in someone’s face, this is very hard”, he says in the video message.

Kurdi, a barber from the Syrian city of Kobani, said the family had hoped to go to Germany or Sweden via Greece.

Kurdi says she’s humbled by the outpouring of support her family has received, although she has also had to endure an onslaught of negative comments from online trolls.

Alan’s photo sparked global outrage brought the world in solidarity against the devastating refugee crisis in Europe. Officials wanted a difficult-to-obtain United Nations document, according to Tima.

She said she’s overwhelmed at the thought that she will at last be reunited with her brother. “Happy for them, for the kids to see their smiles”. “I know we can do it”.

The message in 2013 was given by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who said that “a child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all”, and that the kinds of surveillance outlined in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four “are nothing compared to what we have available today”.

Alan’s father Abdullah, Tima Kurdi’s other brother, survived the capsizing, but has no plans to come to Canada.

The first military plane carrying Syrian refugees to be resettled in Canada arrived in the country in early December, with Mr Trudeau personally greeting many of them upon arrival.

She says the children, at least one of whom had been working to help the family make ends meet in Turkey, will now have the chance to attend school and have a normal life.

“Canadian people have big hearts”, she said.