Pictured: Aylan Kurdi, 3, and Galip, 5, who died in Mediterranean migrant horror

Posing for a family photograph, Aylan Kurdi and his older brother Galip smile for the camera.

But their short lives came to a tragic end which has shocked the world.

The bodies of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi and his brother, Galip, five, were washed up on a Turkish beach.

They had fled war-torn Syria and had tried to make a 13-mile crossing from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos in a dinghy.

Their deaths, alongside their mother, Rehan, 35, today sparked urgent calls for action to tackle the humanitarian catastrophe engulfing Europe. Their father Abdullah Kurdi, who survived, was forced to break the tragic news to relatives, saying: “My wife and two boys are dead.”

The family had been desperately fleeing Kobane to escape Islamic State militants and had been hoping to emigrate to Canada.

Relatives said today Mr Kurdi's only wish now was to return to the war-torn city with the bodies of his wife and children and be buried alongside them.

His sister Teema Kurdi, who emigrated to Canada 20 years ago, said she learned of the tragedy after the father called relatives. “All he said was, ‘My wife and two boys are dead’,” she said. The brothers’ bodies, still wearing tiny T-shirts and shorts, washed up on Ali Hoca Point beach in Bodrum yesterday.

Ms Kurdi said the family had been in limbo after a privately sponsored refugee application was rejected by Canadian authorities because of the complexities involved in applications from Turkey. Like thousands of other Syrian Kurdish refugees in Turkey, the UN would not register them as refugees and the Turkish government would not grant them exit visas.

Ms Kurdi, from Vancouver, told the National Post: “I was trying to sponsor them and I have my friends and neighbours who helped me with the bank deposits, but we couldn’t get them out, and that is why they went in the boat. I was even paying rent for them in Turkey, but it is horrible the way they treat Syrians there.”