TWO men came into my thoughts this week, two fathers. One is a Syrian Kurd, the other an Iraqi. Both have never met but share an unimaginably painful experience.

It was one evening back in September 2016 that I sat down with some Kurdish politicians at a restaurant table in Erbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Shortly after being seated, one of my fellow diners turned and asked if I recognised one of the men at the table opposite. Having replied no, I was told that the man was Abdullah Kurdi, father of Alan Kurdi, the young Syrian boy pictured washed up on a Turkish beach a year earlier who became a tragic symbol of the refugee crisis.

It was a story already all too familiar and one sadly very far from unique despite the global headlines it had generated. For it was only a short time before then that I listened to a similar heartbreaking account from an Iraqi man called Ali Chadan.

It was on the picturesque Greek Island of Kos far from the Middle East’s wars that I met Ali. Just the day before our encounter the makeshift rubber boat he and his children had boarded on the Turkish coast with other refugees had foundered and sank spilling all on board into the waves as it neared the Greek coast.

That night with his four children clinging to him Ali tread water for two hours in the inky blackness of the Aegean, before watching his youngest boy Hussein only six years old, drift off in the night sea. Having finally struggled onto the beach frozen and exhausted he would also lose his youngest daughter, four-year-old Zainab.

I’ll never forget the anguish and hurt that man was going through as he told me his story and we searched in vain along the Kos coastline for any sign of little Hussein.

Abdullah and Ali’s stories of their lost children came to mind this week as yet another headline-making photograph emerged of a desperate father and child who died after risking all for a better life.

Valeria Martinez had not celebrated her second birthday when she drowned last Sunday, grasping her father Oscar Alberto Martinez as they tried to cross the Rio Grande River (Rio Bravo del Norte, to Mexicans) from Mexico into the United States.

The picture of both lying face down in the water, Valeria’s hand still round her father’s neck, not unlike that of Hussein’s before he slipped from Ali’s grasp in the Aegean, bears testimony to the desperate times so many of our fellow human beings face across the world.

Yes, it’s a difficult image to look at, but publishing such photographs is necessary in forcing us to have the much-needed conversations about what is happening as a result of the Trump administration’s policies and attitudes generally to refugees and migrants.

Valeria and her father are now more than a statistic because we have their picture. And just like

Alan Kurdi, their tragedy is far from unique.

The same day the El Salvadoran father and daughter died, two babies, a child and woman were found dead in the Rio Grande Valley, overcome by the searing heat. And three children and an adult from Honduras perished when their raft overturned two months ago while making the river crossing.

Let there be no doubt about this, people do not undertake such risks, putting themselves and their children in danger, unless they have little or no choice. Certainly, among the many refugee and migrant families I have interviewed across the world this is a universal given.

In Ali Chadan’s case his wife had already died in Iraq and the brutal jihadists of Daesh were already bearing down on his community.

For people like Ali who chose to make such journeys, the fear of what lies behind outweighs that which lies ahead.

In the case of those trying to enter the US from Central and Latin America, some are fleeing predatory criminal gangs that stalk the region and kill wantonly. Others are seeking an economic lifeline and escape from crushing poverty.

It’s all too easy for those of us in our comparatively safe and comfortable lives to make judgements about the motives of people whose desperate circumstances most of us would struggle to comprehend. As Ali Chadan put it to me unequivocally by turning my own question on its head about why he fled Iraq: What would you do to save your family and to give them a better life?

Grasping this reasoning goes a long way in helping us understand why a father and mother would take their children on a flimsy boat across oceans or try to swim fast flowing border rivers. Look again at the picture of Valeria and her father. Look at how the toddler’s right arm was curled around her dad’s neck. How his black T-shirt was wrapped around her to hold her close as they crossed the river.

Ali Chadan was right, this is about the most universal of human interactions: parent protecting child against danger, and child clinging to her ultimate source of safety.

One can scarcely begin to imagine what Valeria’s mother, who saw her loved ones swept away in the current, is going through now. Her anguish and suffering will doubtless remain as concealed as those migrant children separated from their parents under the harsh regime created by Donald Trump’s policies.

For weeks now it’s been estimated that at any given time more than 2000 children have been held in the custody of US Border Patrol without their parents.

Legally, they’re not supposed to be held by border agents for more than 72 hours before being sent to the US Department of Health and Human Services. In reality, detention often last weeks in overcrowded facilities without enough food or toothbrushes, with children going days without showering.

Human rights workers recently learned of the case of four toddlers being held in a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, who had to be hospitalised after a visit from their lawyers uncovered dangerous neglect.

Sure the US must have a policy on immigration and there have to be controls in place. Sure certain distinctions can be made between refugees and migrants. Not for one moment though will anyone convince me that what Trump is doing is anything less than playing fast and loose politics at the expense of countless lives, many of them children.

By all accounts the Martinez family were legally entitled to lodge their asylum request at a port of entry but Trump’s “metering” and “remain in Mexico” policies forced them, like many others, to take their chances crossing the Rio Grande.

No longer can we afford to look the other way from such photographs. It’s the responsibility of us all to challenge the policies that led Valeria Martinez and her father down to the Rio Grande river and Ali Chadan and Abdullah Kurdi out onto the Aegean Sea.