Syria, Sep 4 (Agencies) : The father of drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi whose fate shocked the world returned home on Friday to bury his family as European ministers tried to thrash out differences on binding refugee quotas to ease the crisis.
The haunting image of the 3-year-old Aylan washed up on a Turkish beach focused the world's attention on the wave of migration fueled by war and deprivation.
His father Abdullah Kurdi -- who has told how Aylan and his other young son Ghalib "slipped through my hands" when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea -- arrived in the Syrian flashpoint border town of Kobane with the funeral caskets of his sons and wife, who also died.
"As a father who lost his children, I want nothing for myself from this world. All I want is that this tragedy in Syria immediately ends," he said on his way to Kobane, which was devastated in clashes between Islamic State militants and Kurdish fighters.
With the burial, Abdullah abandoned any plans of leaving his homeland again.
"He only wanted to go to Europe for the sake of his children," said Suleiman Kurdi, an uncle of the grieving father. "Now that they're dead, he wants to stay here in Kobani next to them."
The haunting image of Aylan washed up on a Turkish beach focused the world's attention on the wave of migration fueled by war and deprivation.
The three bodies were flown to a city near Turkey's border with Syria, from where police-protected funeral vehicles made their way to the border town of Suruc and crossed into Kobani. Legislators from Turkey accompanied Abdullah to Kobani. Journalists and well-wishers were stopped at a checkpoint some 3 kilometers (2 miles) from the border.
Scores of casually dressed mourners clustered around as the bodies were laid in the dry, bare earth of the Martyrs Cemetery. Clouds of dust rose as dirt was shoveled over the graves.
Some graves in the cemetery were haphazardly marked out with borders of concrete blocks.
Aylan's body was discovered on a Turkish beach in sneakers, blue shorts and a red shirt on Wednesday after the small rubber boat he and his family were in capsized. They were among 12 migrants who drowned off the Turkish coast of Bodrum that day.
The route between Bodrum in Turkey and Kos, just a few miles, is one of the shortest from Turkey to the Greek islands, but it remains dangerous. Hundreds of people a day try to cross it despite the well-documented risks.
Abdullah said the overloaded boat flipped over moments after the captain, described as a Turkish man, panicked and abandoned the vessel, leaving Abdullah as the de facto commander of a small boat overmatched by high seas.
In a police statement later leaked to the Turkish news agency Dogan, Abdullah gave a different account, denying that a smuggler was aboard. However, smugglers often instruct migrants that if caught they should deny their presence.
A divided Europe faces growing international criticism over its response to Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War II, during which more than 350,00 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean, and around 2,600 people have died.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres warned that the EU faced a "defining moment" after little Aylan's death and called for the mandatory resettlement of 200,000 refugees by EU states.
With tensions growing, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande said Thursday they had agreed the EU should now require member states to take in a fixed number of migrants.
Britain to take more refugees
Britain said it would take thousands more from refugee camps on the Syrian border.
Under-fire British Prime Minister David Cameron, whose country has been accused of failing to help shoulder the burden, said he would set out plans next week for his country to take "thousands more" refugees.
"I can announce that we will do more, providing resettlement for thousands more Syrian refugees," Cameron said in Lisbon.
However he insisted that Britain would take refugees direct from camps on the border with Syria and not those already in other EU member states, saying that would just encourage more people to make the journey to Europe.
EU foreign ministers were to meet later in Luxembourg to discuss the crisis, which has split the bloc between countries like Germany advocating greater solidarity and mainly eastern nations such as Hungary that have taken a hardline approach.
Disagreements are rife over Europe's piecemeal migration system and its passport-free Schengen area.
EU rules that asylum claims must be dealt with in the country they first arrive were thrown into turmoil by Germany, which said it will refrain from deporting Syrians.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has proposed quotas for resettling a total of 160,000 refugees across the EU to take the pressure off the overstretched frontline states of Greece, Italy and Hungary.
In Budapest, a tense standoff continued between police and hundreds of refugees blocked by police from carrying on their train journey west towards Germany, Europe's main destination.
On Thursday, the police allowed the refugees board a train in Budapest bound for the Austrian border. But their journey ended just west of the capital in Bicske, where police tried to disembark them and take them to a refugee processing camp.
An estimated 200 to 300 people, angry at what they saw as Hungary's trickery, refused to get off the train, where they spent the night.
When an image brought to focus a crisis
The European tensions erupted into the open on Thursday when Hungary's right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban lashed out at Germany, the EU's biggest economy, for aggravating the crisis.
Orban, whose government has built a fence on the border with Serbia to keep out migrants, also sparked anger by warning that Europe's Christian roots were at risk and saying Hungary did not want Muslim migrants.
The human cost of the migrant crisis has been brought into sharp focus by Aylan's drowning, and the images of the child's lifeless body, in a t-shirt, shorts and shoes, lying on the beach.
The picture sent shock waves across social media and prompted a furious reaction from, among others, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who accused European leaders of turning the Mediterranean into a "cemetery".
Turkey is host to 1.8 million refugees from the conflict in neighbouring Syria.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, a long standing ally of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, said Europe's migrant crisis was an "absolutely expected" result of the West's policies in the Middle East and that he had personally warned of the consequences.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott meanwhile said the images of Aylan showed the need to stop the "evil trade" of people smuggling boats, defending Canberrra's own hardline immigration policies.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said the bloc's new naval mission could step up action against people smugglers in the Mediterranean within weeks, seizing and destroying their boats.