Greece is making Syrian refugees' lives hell – not that the EU seems to mind

The best way I can describe the Turkish/Greek border is “hell on earth”. Of an evening, much of the ground is engulfed in flames; the ground is extremely dry, so as Greek border police throw smoke grenades, the vegetation catches fire. All you can hear is screaming, ammunition and sound grenades; all you can smell is smoke, teargas and the rancid conditions in which people here are forced to live.

Yet for the thousands of Syrians who have fled here from Idlib, the border doesn’t scare them.

I am here with Syria Relief, a UK-based, Syria-focused NGO. Once we heard that many Syrians escaping Idlib were travelling the length of Turkey to try and get into Europe – Turkey having decided to no longer stop refugees trying to access Europe – we went straight to the border.

There, the brutality of the Greek border force shocked me even more than I’d imagined.

It was while conducting a needs assessment by a small town of tents and tipis made from branches and bin liners that we were first teargassed by Greek border police. Little did we know this would soon become a regular occurrence.

It was whilst distributing shoes to people whose footwear had fallen apart after hundreds of miles of walking that we met Abdullah. A few nights beforehand, he told us, Greek border police had stripped and beaten him, stolen his clothes and the 800 euros he had on him. All he owned was a pair of flip-flops.

There are rumours that the Greeks are using live ammunition. Omar, a former white helmet who had escaped Idlib the previous week, showed us a video he said had been taken the night before. It was of someone lying dead on the floor, a few hundred yards away from where were standing. He had been shot in the face.

Most Syrians we speak to want to go to Germany; many have family there from the last refugee crisis in 2015. Mahmoud was an exception. His family is Greek Cypriot, so he wants to visit relatives in Greece. He thought he would be welcomed with open arms – yet now can barely see out of his left eye, after the Greek border police fired a teargas canister at his face.

There is the misconception that it is mainly young men at the border. My colleague noticed a four-year-old Syrian girl called Maryam living in a tent fashioned from tree branches and a translucent plastic sheet. Despite the anarchy around her, she was smiling. “She was born in war,” her father told my colleague. “Nothing scares her.” Intentionally or not, the teargas fired by the Greek forces often lands in tents, meaning women and children suffer disproportionately.

The geopolitics of the Syrian conflict has meant that Syrians victimised in their home country are now being victimised once more whilst trying to get into Europe. People still trapped in Idlib are lucky to make it through the day, but the Syrians at the Greek border are hearing loud and clear the message from Europe is: “Syrians have no future here, either.”

I have written before about the lack of moral leadership from the west, and the situation on the Greek border has highlighted it. EU27 leaders have been queueing up to offer messages of solidarity for Greece as they use extreme force to repel refugees. Yet their silence as innocent Syrians were murdered in Idlib has been deafening. The EU27, it appears, care more about keeping refugees out of Europe than preventing them from becoming refugees in the first place.

Some hoped Turkey’s decision to stop preventing refugees from crossing the border into Europe would make the atrocities in Idlib impossible to ignore. Instead, Europe has proven itself eminently capable of atrocities of its own.

Charles Lawley is head of advocacy at the NGO Syria Relief.