Aylan Kurdi may become a symbol the world needs to remember.
He was 3 years old and was fleeing the devastation in Syria. He didn’t make it to safety. Aylan drowned when the boat carrying him and others apparently capsized and his body washed ashore in Turkey. He had been headed for one of the many islands of Greece that dot the Aegean Sea.
An essay by a doctoral candidate at American University makes a compelling case that Aylan’s death ought to signal to the warring sides that the time for peace really and truly is at hand.
Suzanne Ghais writes: “The priority must be to find a peace plan that all major players can get behind, even if our favorite dogs don’t win. If Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Europeans agree with us that (Syrian dictator Bashar) al-Assad should go, there will be a way to get him out. The exhausted Syrian government could not oppose such an overwhelming consensus for long.”
The Syrian civil war has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent victims. Many have died from terrible weapons deployed by the dictator’s military forces.
And as the world has seen, the victims too often are helpless children … just like Aylan.
How can the world continue to let this happen?