DIMITROVGRAD, Serbia — For some, Dimitrovgrad is where the nightmare ends.

The little town in eastern Serbia (population 6,000) is an otherwise unremarkable place. Set in a green valley, it paints a peaceful, bucolic tableau save for a small police station on a hill overlooking the town. It's here that a steady stream of Iraqis, Syrians and Afghans emerge daily to report allegations of abuse at the hands of police in neighboring Bulgaria. If even half of the claims are accurate, it would seem that Bulgaria is the European Union’s most violent land for transiting refugees.

Over the past year, the world has become accustomed to photos of refugees in orange life jackets arriving on Europe’s southern shores in dangerously overcrowded rubber boats. The Mediterranean claimed around 3,770 lives last year according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and many refugees have now started to take alternative routes. Recent reports from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have all raised alarming attention to the safety of refugees who attempt to enter Europe through Turkey and Bulgaria. Claims of violence — including beatings, pistol whippings, summary pushbacks, theft, unlawful imprisonment and even murder — by local police forces have climbed.

Ali and Ahmed, two Yazidis from Nineveh Governate in northern Iraq, sit on a bus outside the Dimitrovgrad police station after completing registration. They are still shivering after walking many hours through the forest to reach Serbia. The linings of their jackets are ripped — the result of the Bulgarian police searching them for money, they say.

“We tried the Bulgarian border four times and the final time we were successful but then we met the police,” said Ali. “They shot in the air, they set dogs on us and one father who tried to defend his daughter from the dogs got beaten by the police. They took our phones that we were using for GPS and €200 each. They looked everywhere, even our underwear. There was a man with disabilities who couldn’t understand what the police were telling him, but they beat him anyway. We heard these rumors about Bulgaria but there is no other way for us. Daesh [ISIL] is half an hour from our city, you cannot feel safe.”

A razor wire fence covers 70 kilometers of Bulgaria’s 230-kilometer border with Turkey, and the rest is crisscrossed with ravines, dense woodland and craggy hills. Yet Istanbul-based smuggling networks that cater to specific ethnicities — almost all refugees arriving in Dimitrovgrad are Kurdish Iraqis and Pashto Afghans — are still ferrying a few hundred people across the border daily. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that just under 30,000 refugees entered Bulgaria in 2015, a seemingly small percentage of the total arrivals in Europe, which passed the million mark.

Yet no other EU state has seen anywhere near a comparable number of allegations of violence committed against refugees. In a continent increasingly torn by how to deal with the ceaseless arrival of people fleeing the world’s worst conflicts, Bulgaria’s tough approach is silently tolerated, if not publicly endorsed.

In December 2015, British Prime Minister David Cameron met with his Bulgarian counterpart (and former bodyguard to Communist dictator Todor Zhivkov), posed for photos at Bulgaria’s fence with Turkey and praised the border regime for doing “vital work” for Britain in stemming the flow of refugees.

A joint report by the Belgrade Center for Human Rights and Oxfam published in October 2015 found that, of around 110 refugees consulted in a two-day period, all who had contact with the Bulgarian police reported some form of violence or extortion. The Bulgarian Deputy Interior Minister Philip Gounev accused the NGO of using “flawed research methods,” and suggested that refugees may be exaggerating or fabricating their stories so as not to be returned to Bulgaria under the Dublin regulation.

In March 2015, the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee reported that two Iraqi Yazidis fleeing ISIL and whose legs were reportedly broken by Bulgarian police were brought back to Turkey by friends and, unable to move, eventually froze to death in a remote village.

Responding to allegations that his police force used excessive violence, Gounev first chose to focus on the claimants’ immigration status and maintains that Bulgaria is rooting out potential security threats to Europe.

“The use of force to subdue a large group of migrants who disobey police orders, yes that takes place,” Gounev said. “On a monthly basis we identify individuals who are related to either terrorist organizations or radical movements or sympathize with them, foreign fighters and so forth.”

ISIL views Yazidis as infidels and persecuted them so brutally that the few families with resources to do so choose to flee Iraq and Turkey, mistrustful of living in any Muslim society. Last November, Kurdish forces backed by U.S. airstrikes liberated the Yazidi heartland of Sinjar, only to find numerous mass graves of women ISIL militants had deemed too old to become sex slaves.

Aboard a bus in Dimitrovgrad, an Iraqi-Yazidi father proudly introduced his two-year-old daughter Jilan, named after a 19 year-old Yazidi girl who was captured in Mosul by ISIL in 2014 and slashed her wrists before she could be dragged into a world of rape.

“The majority of them are basically economic migrants, not refugees,” Gounev maintains. “[The Yazidis] are internally displaced to safe areas of Iraq and they are looking for economic opportunities in Europe.”

Usually arriving in the dead of night, refugees in Dimitrovgrad first register with the local police to obtain a document which gives them 72 hours to either claim asylum in Serbia, or leave (almost all choose the latter). Outside the police station the local Serbian mafia run a racket of shuttle buses to Belgrade, charging double the normal rate. Some refugees, who allege they were robbed by the police as they crossed the Bulgarian border, cannot pay the fare. It's left to a small band of European volunteers to appeal to the mafia to give them a free pass. Some volunteers pay out of their own pocket.

We idly discuss the Bulgarian authorities’ conduct with Goran, a ‘businessman’ from the nearby city of Niš, who oversees the bus operation. About Bulgaria, he sniffs disdainfully:

“They are not really behaving as you might expect from a European Union member.”

Coordinating the volunteers is Tarek Muharat, originally from Homs, the ruined city so closely linked to the Syrian revolution, and now a Serbian resident. He wearily points out that negotiating with gangsters is an undesirable but necessary part of the process.

“On my first day, I came to the camp after I received a phone call informing me that the police are beating the refugees in the yard,” Muharat said. “I arrive and there is this gigantic guy blocking my path, not police, not local, he never identifies himself. I explain who I am and he tells me, ‘How about I kill you and send you back to Syria in a box?’ And I reply, ‘Actually that would be great, I haven’t been back home in years.’ Then he let me in. Joking is the only way.”

At the end of his shift, Ali Irani, a translator for the Serbian police in Dimitrovgrad, heads home. I follow him down the hill back into town and he begins to talk about the distressing tales he hears on a daily basis.

"It makes me angry but I can do nothing, I just have to listen to them. Bulgarian police are just searching for the money — if someone doesn't have money, they have to go to jail. Two weeks ago a boy told me that they didn’t believe his age — he was sixteen — so put him in jail for 80 days. He has a beard and looks old, but he’s a child. They are shooting them also. Some of the migrants told me that people are dying on the way. Their bodies are still there.”

A spluttering engine backfires in the distance. Can he prove these allegations? Ali shrugs, pulling his jacket tight against the cold.

“I don’t know. I didn't see it. I just say what people tell me, that's all."

Gounev explains that the police have a right to shoot in the air to halt intruding refugees.

“We have a policy, especially when there is aggressive behavior — and there is on a monthly basis — [the border police] fire warning shots. It was such an occasion when we had an … accident with a refugee or a migrant being injured and died.”

On October 15, 2015, in the Bulgarian town of Dyulevo, near the Turkish border, Ziaullah Vafa, 19, from Afghanistan, was shot dead by border police in front of his brother after he and around 50 others were caught hiding under a bridge. Bulgarian authorities maintain he was hit by a “ricochet” bullet fragment following a “warning shot” after the group “resisted” and refused to obey commands.

As the poorest country in the EU with an unemployment rate that hovers at around 10 percent rate and an average monthly salary of €300, Bulgaria is not a desired destination for refugees, and 99 percent of those who apply for asylum only do so as a formality after they are apprehended by the police. Similarly, asylum seekers don't have bright prospects in Serbia, where some reception centers still host ethnic Serb refugees who fled Croatia and Bosnia during the wars of the ’90s. Employment opportunities and meaningful integration remain elusive in both countries.

In the Serbian capital of Belgrade, 330 kilometers away, a repurposed concert venue is often the site of refugees’ first friendly welcome. From the bus station, it is a mere five-minute walk to Miksaliste (“the mixing place”), on the banks of the Sava river. Supported by grassroots NGOs, here refugees stock up on food, medicine and clothes — all provided by donations.

Omar, 21, an engineering student from the restive Baghlan Province in Afghanistan dusts off a smart brown trenchcoat and shakes his head as he recollects his Bulgarian experience.

“When the police catch you, they will take everything — money, phone… Anything you have, even food. They kick, they hit with sticks. One [policeman] hit one of our friends and his leg was broken.”

Volunteer manager Aleksandra Djurdjev speaks as a group of Afghan men pour tea and kick a football in the background.

“I see them smile here, enjoying conversations, but then when we start talking with them about what they have been through in Bulgaria, those are sad stories. It’s not unusual for the volunteers to cry a lot in the beginning.”

Though the interior ministry stresses that excessive force and extortion are not policy, a 2013 investigation by Bulgarian state TV broadcast interviews with members of the border police who revealed that their superiors instructed them to “beat” refugees and “send them back.”

According to Gounev, most refugees’ claims about police conduct do not specify a location, and are therefore impossible to investigate.

“I think that if this was a massive case of abuse this would mean that thousands of migrants would have been abused, which would mean that there is some kind of undeclared crime, which I think is very unlikely.”

Just next to the gates of Miksaliste, a little white tent has been set up as a playroom for refugee children. With paints and crayons, many draw images of their odyssey to Europe. Plastered on one of the walls, among countless colorful doodles of rolling hills and crowded cars, one quotation stands out, heart-stopping in its childlike bluntness:

“In Bulgaria people shoot at everyone, shoot at children. Why? We are not terrorists.”

Andrew Connelly (@connellyandrew) is a roving freelance journalist covering politics in Europe and its borders.