After walking for many months, crossing the sea was the worst thing... my 2-year-old daughter fell in and she is now very sick

Afghan families seek asylum but find only misery

lator: “We all left our home at night. We gathered what we thought we would need for the journey and just left.

“Our village in Helmand Province was being attacked by the Taliban because we are a minority tribe. They wanted us out. I had already been injured in an Islamic State bomb attack.

“After many months walking, getting across the sea was the worst thing.

“My two-year-old daughter fell in. She has been coughing and very sick. Maybe she has pneumonia. Now, thank God, she is getting medical help.”

As he talks, his sons Yasin, six and Mahamad, four, throw pebbles into the sea. His other daughter, Sahirah, shows me their pile of belongings.

They have six blankets and six sleeping bags in bin liners, and little else.

Kostas, a police officer helping clear up, surveys the pitiful scene.

“This is an impossible problem,” he says. “It is inhuman to leave them, but people here in

Lesbos feel they have been abandoned by the government and by Europe.”

He picks up the fake lifejackets left on a bench where tourists would usually come to admire the view, muttering: “They would actually drown more quickly wearing these.”

Around the coast, an EU flag flutters as a reminder that this is the frontier of Europe.

Greek coastguard vessels are the only ships on the horizon. The latest influx of migrants was prompted by Turkey’s hardline president Erdogan declaring his nation’s borders with Europe were open. He said Turkey had no choice after 3.7 million Syrian refugees flooded in. But Greece toughened up security. Yesterday Turkey said a Pakistani migrant was shot dead by Greek security forces at the land border.

Greece denies the claims.

It also faced global condemnation after footage emerged of a packed dinghy nearly capsizing as a coastguard ship sped towards it.

Officers could be seen pushing back the flimsy craft with poles.

The Greeks’ actions follow attacks against aid workers on Lesbos.

An Irish volunteer doctor told how her team was ambushed by a mob, some of whom were armed with nail-headed cudgels.

Dr Victoria Bradley, a GP, said the convoy of eight vehicles she was in was surrounded as it left the Moria reception camp on Lesbos, where nearly 30,000 migrants live in filthy conditions. Last week a planned deportation camp was torched by protesters. Lesbos-born Val Moore, a Greek citizen based in the US, told me: “Refugees have become the scapegoats for the downturn in tourism here. It has been brewing for years. They worry that tourists will stop coming and they will lose their livelihoods.”