When the Border Was a Buffer Zone, a Baton, a Bullet

For Ali Muhammadi, the border was a buffer zone between Turkey and Greece. The way he told it, the border was sometimes a baton, a clenched fist, a stick a soldier swung in the woods, a warning shot fired into the sky. More than once, but not every time, the Greek border guards beat him and others after they traversed the Evros River, which traces most of the land boundary between the two countries. The border was also a routine, a journey he attempted so many times over several months in 2022 that he struggled to put a precise number on it. If he had to guess, his best bet would have been 15 times, but he couldn’t be sure. “Maybe 20 times,” he told me when we met in Athens in November 2022.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Greek government had put in place stricter border policies, and reports of illegal expulsions had mounted. When I returned to Greece in late 2022, after two years in the United States, Ali was the first person I met who had made the land crossing from Turkey, and I was eager to speak with him about the impact that the new hardline migration policies had on people making the crossing.

Each time Ali crossed, Greek border guards confiscated his phone along with all the photos on it, he recalled, and sometimes took his food. Now and then, they forced the refugees to strip and walk back to the Turkish side. I asked him why he thought the authorities made them disrobe. “In our minds, they were belittling us and punishing us in order to [encourage us] to not come again,” he said. “Of course, it doesn’t work.”

Before ever making it to the Greek-Turkish border, Ali’s trek had been long and tiresome. He was studying art at a university in Kabul when the United States withdrew its troops in August 2021, ending a two-decade occupation and paving the path for the Taliban to overrun what remained of the country. He fled when the capital fell, first back to his village in the Ghazni province and later to Pakistan. From Pakistan, he crossed to Iran. From Iran, he recounted, he and others walked for days through the mountains until they reached Turkey. There, he spent around a year of his life living in a refugee camp in Edirne, less than five miles from the European Union’s southeastern frontier.

Despite the risks and roadblocks, some got lucky — Ali eventually counted himself among them. On his last trip, he explained, Greek police found him and five others who’d made it into the country. One of the officers recognized him from a previous crossing attempt. The other five were whisked back across the border, but he was allowed to apply for asylum. They sent Ali to a refugee camp, the first of several where he spent time. That November, he received asylum. In the years after I met Ali, displaced people would tell me grim stories like the ones Ali had heard time and again in camps in Turkey and Greece, stories like his own, and stories yet grimmer more times than I could count.

For others, like Yonous Muhammadi — he isn’t related to Ali — the border was a gang of far-right vigilantes patrolling a public park back in 2001, when he first arrived in Greece after fleeing the Taliban in Afghanistan. Armed with sticks and flagpoles, the men threatened him and urged him to leave the country. In the years that followed, he would go on to make and distribute to fellow refugees city maps on which he’d marked an X over neighbors where they were more likely to face the risk of a fascist attack.

I’d met Yonous several times over the years, and we often discussed the most frightening moments of far-right violence, periods when many refugees and migrants were too afraid to file police reports for fear of ending up in a jail cell. When I met him again in late 2022, he explained that although a court had banned the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn — one of the main groups behind anti-migrant violence in the early 2010s — the situation had, in other ways, continued to decline for refugees and migrants on the borders since the conservative New Democracy party returned to power in 2019 elections. “Everything has changed,” he said, explaining that, in his view, the New Democracy government had tried to make the lives of refugees and migrants “hell in order to send a message . . . to not come, and for those who are here to leave Greece.”

The better part of a decade had passed since 2015, when Greece experienced the first sharp surge in refugees and migrants amid what became known as the European refugee crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people had continued to board frail dinghies and cross the Aegean Sea. Few were unaware of the risks — fatal crashes and people drowning at sea had become so common that they no longer made the news as often as they once did. But people continued to leave. Hard borders hadn’t stopped anyone. Whether at sea or on land, they only made the journey more dangerous. “So many people are lost on this journey,” Yonous said.

Meanwhile, rights groups and monitors said Greece had turned pushbacks — measures like the ones Ali Muhammadi described, in which refugees and migrants are kicked out without being allowed to apply for asylum — into routine policy. In effect, pushbacks are extrajudicial deportations, and depending on the circumstances during which they occur, they often take place in violation of international and European Union law.

In July 2022, Forensic Architecture, a research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London, published a study examining “drift-backs,” or pushbacks at sea, during which authorities force refugee boats out of their territorial waters. That study found that drift-backs had been used as a “systematic, calculated practice.”

Forensic Architecture’s research documented 1,018 drift-backs throughout a two-year period starting on Feb. 28, 2020. Of that total, Frontex had been “directly involved” in at least 122 instances, the study said, and in 26 cases, the Hellenic Coast Guard threw people “directly into the sea.”

In December 2022, the Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN), a coalition of nonprofits and associations, released the Black Book of Pushbacks, an updated version of a dossier first published in 2020. Commissioned by The Left political group in the European Parliament, the updated Black Book spans more than 3,000 pages and paints a picture of what many refugees and migrants face on Europe’s borders: beatings, threats, and summary expulsions.

For some who tried to cross the land boundary between Turkey and Greece, the border was a bullet.

Hope Barker, who researched pushbacks in Greece for the Black Book, said BVMN had started documenting reports of pushbacks in 2019. At that time, pushbacks “seemed random,” she told me, but when the pandemic hit, pushbacks “began happening from deep in the mainland and into the interior.” Cities like Thessaloniki had once been considered a safe distance from the border, but from early 2020 onward, that was no longer the case — authorities would detain someone hundreds of miles from the border and forcibly return them, nonetheless. “It’s totally normal now,” she said. “It’s happening on a daily basis, I would say.”

In late 2023, Doctors Without Borders released a report that investigated both border violence and pushbacks as well as “the physical and psychological suffering, as well as the life-threatening risks, endured by those seeking safety and protection in Greece.” The following year, the number of displaced people reaching Greece by land and sea once again grew, and reports of pushbacks emerged at a steady clip.

For some who tried to cross the land boundary between Turkey and Greece, the border was a bullet. Take, for instance, Muhammad Gulzar, a Pakistani migrant who had previously spent several years working in Greece and briefly returned to his home country to get married. On March 4, 2020, as he tried to make it back to Greece, he was shot dead on the Turkish side of the land border.

Two months later, a coalition of researchers and investigative journalists from Bellingcat, Lighthouse Reports, and Forensic Architecture released a report that pieced together witness testimony, videos, photos, and satellite imagery, among other clues.

Although the investigation couldn’t say definitively who had fired the bullet that killed Gulzar, it concluded that “Greek security forces likely used live rounds . . . against refugees and migrants trying to break through the Turkish-Greek border fence” that day.  Stelios Petsas, then a spokesperson for the Greek government, insisted that border forces hadn’t fired any live rounds, claiming the reports were “fake news.”

Back in Athens in late 2022, I asked Ali Muhammadi about the five others he’d crossed with on that last trip. I wanted to know whether, like him, they’d eventually crossed successfully. He shook his head and explained that they had been pushed back to Turkey, then returned to Afghanistan. Even now that he’d made it to Greece, Ali didn’t plan to stay long. He’d received asylum, sure, but he hoped to push onward to Germany or elsewhere in Europe. Greece, he told me, “is not a country where I can achieve my dreams.”

I asked what he meant, and Ali lifted his phone and scrolled through photos he’d taken on the last trip across the border, the successful crossing: snapshots of a young man’s shoulder welted from the blows, photos of his friends beaten black and blue.

This is a lightly adapted excerpt of Patrick Strickland’s new book, You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave: Refugees, Fascism, and Bloodshed in Greece (Melville House, April 2025).