World Bulletin / News Desk

Thursday’s dailies dedicated their front pages to a heartbreaking photo of a drowned Syrian toddler washed up on the beach of Turkey’s southern resort district of Bodrum.

MILLIYET ran with the front-page headline “Shame on you, world!” running a photo showing the little boy lying face down on the beach.

The newspaper reported that there was “no single country other than Turkey that received the migrants fleeing from the war with open arms.”

Identified as Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old boy dressed in shorts and a red T-shirt was one of 12 Syrians who drowned in the Aegean Sea after two boats filled with refugees en route to Greece sank on Wednesday.

The refugees were on their way to Greece’s Kos island from the Turkish tourist resort town of Bodrum.

Apart from being a tourist destination, Bodrum serves as a preferred location for refugees trying to reach Kos, as the route is considered among the shortest by sea from Asia to an EU state.

Running the same gut-wrenching photo, HURRIYET’s headline read: "It [the photo of toddler] shook the world”.

“Humanity has washed up on shore,” read VATAN’s front page.

The daily said that British newspaper The Independent has given a lesson in humanity to Europeans, which "closed the door to those who escaped war and cruelty [with its story title]".

“If these extraordinarily powerful images of a dead Syrian child washed up on a beach don’t change Europe’s attitude to refugees, what will?” The Independent asked in its story published on Thursday. 

In the first five months of 2015, over 42,000 people arrived by sea to Greece, according to the United Nations refugee agency.

Numerous papers also focused on Wednesday’s abduction of 18 Turkish workers in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

HURRIYET ran a photo of a stadium construction site where the workers were located under the headline “Our 18 workers kidnapped”.

According to the Foreign Ministry spokesman Tanju Bilgic, the kidnappers had specifically targeted Turkish employees, who were singled out among other employees with different nationalities.

Those kidnapped included 14 workers, three engineers and an accountant, Bilgic said on Wednesday. 

HABERTURK wrote: “ISIL [ISIL] suspected for 18 workers,” reporting that Turkish intelligence was considering a possibility that ISIL militants had kidnapped the workers.

SABAH quoted CEO Ugur Dogan of the Turkish construction company Nurol, for which the 18 kidnapped were working, as saying: “There has not been a ransom demand so far.”  The daily said that Ankara and Baghdad were cooperating to find ways to rescue the workers.

In economic news, DUNYA’s headline read: “Number of the Syrian-financed companies has exceeded 10,000 [in Turkey].”

According to official figures, over 60 percent of Syrian companies [1,079] are operating in Istanbul, the daily said. Gaziantep with 471 companies and Hatay with 250 companies followed Istanbul, it added.