Pope Francis met Sunday evening in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, the father of Aylan Kurdi, the little Syrian boy, who drowned in the Aegean Sea, who became a tragic symbol of the refugee crisis in 2015.
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The photographs of the body of the three-year-old boy stranded on a beach in Turkey had caused shock and awareness about refugees from the war in Syria.
"
The Pope spoke at length with Abdullah Kurdi
", who now lives in Iraqi Kurdistan, "
and was able to listen to the pain of a father who lost his family
", indicates a statement from the Vatican, while the sovereign pontiff made of welcoming refugees one of the major themes of his pontificate.
Aylan Kurdi drowned with his older brother Galip and his mother Rehanna when their inflatable boat sank in the middle of the Aegean Sea.
The family from Kobane, in northern Syria, wanted to join Canada.
Pope Francis concluded his visit to Iraq, the first by a pope in the country's history, on Sunday evening with a mass at a stadium in Erbil.
Since Friday, he has crisscrossed Baghdad, Mosul or Qaraqosh in the north tortured by the jihadists, and carried the cause of one of the oldest Christian communities but also one of the most dispersed in the world to the great Ayatollah Ali Sistani. , a religious reference for most Shia Muslims.
In one of his speeches, Pope Francis called for "
peace
" in the Middle East and "
especially in martyred Syria
" where a popular revolt degenerated into a complex war just 10 years ago, making more of 387,000 deaths.