The Greek coastguard on Friday said it was looking for seven migrants feared missing near the Aegean island of Kos, after rescuing 115 Syrians in a separate incident.

The search began after a migrant plucked from the Aegean Sea by a fishing boat told rescuers there had been another seven people on a boat that overturned.

A four-year-old Syrian girl's body washed up on a beach in western Turkey on Friday, state media said, just weeks after images of drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi shook the world. 

The yet-to-be identified girl was found lifeless on a beach in the Aegean town of Cesme in Izmir province after a boat carrying 15 Syrians to the Greek island of Chios sank, the official Anatolia news agency said. 

Refugees on the Greek island of Kos were attacked in the early hours of Friday by "thugs" with bats, telling them to "go back to their countries", rights group Amnesty International said.

Amnesty staff witnessed "a violent attack on refugees" by a group of between 15 and 25 people on the island, the group said in a statement, adding that riot police had used tear gas to disperse the crowd.

The father of a drowned Syrian toddler whose fate shocked the world returned home Friday to bury his family as European ministers tried to thrash out differences on binding refugee quotas to ease the crisis.

Britain said it would take thousands more from refugee camps on the Syrian border as the heartbreaking images of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi's lifeless body on a Turkish beach ramped up pressure on political leaders to act.

When Wael and his relatives from Syria climbed into an inflatable boat in the dead of night to cross the sea from Turkey to Greece, they abandoned all their belongings -- except their smartphones.

"Our phones and power banks are more important for our journey than anything, even more important than food," said Wael, a 32-year-old from the devastated Syrian city Homs who reached the Greek resort island of Kos on Thursday morning.

The number of migrants arriving in crisis-hit Greece is accelerating dramatically, with nearly 21,000 landing on the overstretched Greek islands last week alone, the United Nations said Tuesday.

Since the beginning of the year, more than 160,000 migrants have made their way to Greece -- nearly four times the 43,500 who arrived in the country during all of 2014, the U.N. refugee agency said.

Duaa, a 22-year-old Syrian refugee and mother of two, is nervously counting down the hours in the Turkish resort city of Bodrum, hoping this will be the night her family's life will finally take a turn for the better.

She says her husband paid people-smugglers $1,200 (1,000 euros) for each member of the family to squeeze into an inflatable dinghy for the short but perilous passage from the Turkish coast across the Aegean to the Greek island of Kos and -- maybe -- to a new life in the EU.

Scores of Syrian refugees who recently arrived on the Greek island of Kos began registering early Sunday on a ship sent by the government following tensions over a huge influx of arrivals.

The Eleftherios Venizelos, docked in Kos since Friday, will be moored for about two weeks, officials say.

It may be paradise for tourists, but Syrian refugees on Kos are desperate to leave the island and start new lives further north after waiting in hellish conditions to get registered.

"The road ahead is still long for me. I leave tomorrow. First I will go to Macedonia, then Serbia. I hope to reach Germany, where I will be treated like a human being," said 16-year-old Ibrahim Najjar, a Syrian Kurd.

Greece has sent extra riot police to the resort island of Kos as tensions mount over an influx of migrants and refugees, the police said Wednesday.

The deployment came after the island's mayor, Giorgos Kiritsis, warned of "bloodshed" if the situation on the island of 33,000 people -- where around 7,000 migrants are waiting to apply for immigration papers  -- worsened.