A Syrian refugee whose wife and seven children drowned crossing the Aegean Sea has urged others to “stay in Syria, however difficult it is”.
Ali Alsaho fled from the Islamic State in Syria and headed for Europe in the hope of a better life for him and his family. He paid a smuggler £4,600 to get them from Cesme on the west coast of Turkey to the Greek island of Chios, but they never made it.
Smugglers(走私犯) had told Mr Alsaho, from Deir ez-Zor in Syria, the 10-mile journey would only take 15 minutes and they would not need life jackets, he told Mark Lowen at The Sunday Times. But the engine failed and the boat turned over, and although he could hear his children scream, he could not find them in the dark.
Mr Alsaho was saved by fishermen but his entire family died. His youngest was just 20 days old, while his eldest was nine. “I took my children out of Syria to escape the shelling, the killing and the air strikes,” he told The Sunday Times. He said one of his daughters needed to have an operation and he wanted her to have it done in Germany.
Mr Alsaho, who worked as a motorbike salesman in his home country, described the smugglers as “traitors” who lied to him and overloaded the boat. Asked what he would say to other Syrians considering risking their lives for a better life in Europe, he said, “Don’t take this risk. I advise everyone not to come. Stay in Syria, however difficult it is.”
On Thursday, it was revealed that more than 430,000 asylum(庇护) seekers crossed into Europe during the summer. The influx(涌入) took the total over 12 months to more than a million and triggered a sharp increase in asylum claims in Britain.
According to the EU’s statistics agency Eurostat, there were more than 35,000 applications in the UK in the year to the end of September, a figure almost a quarter higher than that given by the Home Office.
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