At least 8,500 people have died or disappeared while attempting to cross the Mediterranean since the death of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed ashore in Turkey in 2015, drawing global attention to the plight of refugees.
According to the latest figures released by the UN’s refugee agency, 4,337 people are believed to have drowned since September 2016 while attempting to reach European shores. Most departed from Libya bound for Italy, from Turkey bound for Greece or, more recently, from Morocco bound for Spain. A further 4,185 people died in the previous 12 months, from 1 September 2015 until the end of August 2016.
The figures have been released by the UNHCR to mark the second anniversary of the Syrian boy’s death, which has also inspired Khaled Hosseini, the bestselling author of The Kite Runner, to write a short story about a Syrian father and son facing an uncertain future on a boat.
Hosseini’s short story, Sea Prayer, has been transformed into a virtual reality project published by the Guardian on Friday, made in collaboration with the UNHCR. In it, the protagonist pleads with the waters to keep his child safe.
Hosseini, a UNHCR goodwill ambassador, has been an advocate for refugees since 2006, travelling to Afghanistan, Chad, Iraq, Jordan and Uganda.
Photographs of Alan’s body lying face down on the sand near the Turkish resort of Bodrum on 2 September 2015 dominated front pages worldwide, and touched a nerve with Hosseini.
“The way I thought about it, when I saw the photo, was all the unseen work that goes into the raising of a child,” he told the Guardian in an interview. “All the private worries, the private anxieties … We worry and fret over their wellbeing, and to have done all that work, and see the person that you poured all that love and all that passion and all that work into, and to see that body lying face down on the beach …”
The UNHCR said that although the number of refugees arriving in Europe had “drastically decreased” since Alan’s death, perilous sea journeys continued to result in the deaths of thousands. Clampdowns on routes to Europe via Libya and restrictions imposed on the Turkey-Greece route are partly responsible for the reduction in the number of people arriving, but this is leading hundreds to risk their lives crossing the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco to Spain on inflatable vessels and rickety fishing boats.
The refugee agency urged the international community to take action to prevent further tragedies, saying in a statement that if poor conditions continued in countries such as Syria, people “will continue to gamble their lives making desperate journeys”.
“Many of the children trying to reach Europe travel on their own, making the journey even more terrifying and perilous,” the UNHCR said. “This was the case for 92% of the 13,700 children who arrived to Italy by sea in the first seven months of 2017.”
According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 120,000 people have arrived in Europe by sea so far this year, with about 82% travelling to Italy from Libya. In June, Italian coastguards rescued about 5,000 people in one day in the Mediterranean. In August, 600 people were rescued by the Spanish maritime safety and rescue agency and the Red Cross in a single day. They arrived in at least 15 different vessels off the coast of Tarifa.
Hosseini, whose books have sold 38m copies worldwide, was once a refugee himself, arriving in the US at the age of 15 speaking little English. His father was an Afghan diplomat working in Paris, and the family fled to the US after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Hosseini practised as a doctor before embarking on his writing career.