Alan, a 3-year-old Syrian boy in a red t-shirt, washed up dead on a Turkish beach in 2015.
He and his family had paid smugglers to get them to Greece, the closest country in the European Union. Alan’s 5-year-old brother and his mother drowned in the attempt, too:
Alan’s photo spread across the world, putting a face on the Syrian refugee crisis.
Desperate to reach Europe, half a million Syrians paid outrageous sums to smugglers to cross from Turkey to Greece on rickety boats. If they survived, they started walking. They were stopped in Serbia, stranded in Budapest, pushed up against the border fences.
In all, almost a million people fled across the Mediterranean by boat to Europe in 2015. Of those, 3,771 people drowned.
But that was just one piece of a global humanitarian crisis. Everywhere, people are on the move.
Imagine every man, woman and child in New York City, London, Paris and Cairo grabbing a cell phone, some cash and what they could carry.
That would add up to the number of people who left their homes in search of safety in 2015, according to the UNHCR, the United Nations agency for refugees and migrants.
Read the full story from The Free Press: “The Camden Conference 2017 – Humanity’s Crisis: Refugees and Global Migration”
