“Will I stay there?” wondered the Syrian student, staring into his steaming tea. “Or will they send me back?”

As night fell on Saturday in the Turkish port of Izmir, Youssef Frayha was not the only person entering the unknown. Frayha, the refugees travelling with him to Greece and the smugglers sending them on their way all knew they were guinea pigs for a new era.

Within hours a deal between the EU and Turkey agreed on Friday was supposed to result in almost all new arrivals on the Greek islands being sent back to Turkey.

Every night for the past year, the warren of streets circling Izmir’s Basmane Square has been a springboard for hundreds of thousands of would-be asylum seekers hoping to reach the Greek islands that lie a few miles across the Aegean sea. If they escaped the Turkish border police, and then survived the crossing, most of them stood a reasonable chance of making it to northern Europe.

Starting from midnight on Sunday, all that was scheduled to end. But Frayha, due to leave in the last few hours of Saturday, was one of hundreds to remain undeterred – and will be among the first people to test whether the system actually works.

“I have to go,” Frayha said. “I don’t care about the rules. I know I sound like a teenager, but I have to think like a teenager – otherwise I will never go. If they send me back, they send me back.”

Across the Aegean, police said that by dawn yesterday at least a dozen boats had landed on the shores of Lesbos, the island on the frontline of Europe’s biggest migration crisis since the second world war. Two men were pulled unconscious from the first three boats to arrive and were later pronounced dead.

There was chaos and uncertainty over how people like Frayha would be sent back, while tensions rose as Greek coastguard officials tried to keep smugglers at bay.

As a mass evacuation of the Greek islands got under way – with authorities ferrying the first of more than 7,000 refugees and migrants to camps on the mainland – the coastguard fired at Turkish traffickers attempting to dump yet more people on the tiny island of Oinousses off Chios. Police said the incident, including the first shots fired in anger since Friday’s deal, highlighted how difficult the agreement would be to enforce in practice.



Indicative of the pressure on the near-bankrupt country, Greece signalled it would be impossible to begin returns until it received backup support from fellow EU members in the form of up to 4,000 interpreters, security specialists and asylum experts. “Obviously this agreement can’t be implemented in 24 hours,” said Giorgos Kyritsis, a spokesman for Athens’ migration coordination centre.

By Sunday, some 48,141 asylum seekers had been stranded in Greece. Non-governmental organisations reported scenes of mayhem at the port of Piraeus, where about 5,000 men, women and children amassed.

“The situation is extremely explosive,” said one volunteer. “We’re running out of tents and food.”

With frustration mounting among refugees, brawls and scuffles have increasingly occurred, with Greek authorities being forced over the weekend to rush in extra security to keep rival ethnic groups apart in Piraeus and Idomeni, where more than 12,000 are now trapped in especially squalid conditions on the Greek-Macedonian border. “There is a lot of tension among refugees,” added Kyritsis. “What worries us most is that clashes may take places along ethnic lines.”

In the backstreets around Basmane Square, refugees changed their money into euros, and wrapped their electrical belongings in makeshift waterproofs made from clingfilm and party balloons. All Saturday evening, smugglers pushed would-be asylum seekers into taxis and buses that then headed towards the departure points on the coast.



Top priorities before the trip to Europe: change lira into euros; buy a lifejacket; waterproof your electricals. pic.twitter.com/mwntyINwRe — Patrick Kingsley (@PatrickKingsley) March 19, 2016

For their part, the smugglers scoffed at the EU’s attempts to stop people’s passage. “Today is a normal day,” said Abu Hamid, sipping a tea outside the cheap hotel he block-books for his customers. “Nothing’s changed. The smuggling will continue. There will always be people going.”

While he disappeared to make another deal, his partner said that if the Aegean proved too difficult, then refugees would simply try other routes to Europe.

“People over the past period of course were scared about going – because they don’t want to get stuck in Greece,” the second smuggler said. “But they will go again. It’s either Italy again, or Bulgaria by land. The only real solution is to get rid of Bashar al-Assad [the Syrian dictator] and to dissolve his security services. Until then people will keep going – I will go myself in a couple of months.”

Others were far more pessimistic. As the deadline approached, shopkeepers reported that several people had returned their lifejackets. Late at night, dozens of Syrians then gathered in Izmir’s coach station, preparing to catch the last bus back to Istanbul.

Fahed, 19, was one of those now resigned to a life in Turkey of poverty and illegal labour. The Syrian had wanted to reach Europe because he does not have the right to work legally in Turkey, despite the introduction of a new law in January that was theoretically supposed to help him enter the regular labour market.

But as midnight approached, Fahed gave up on his dream and prepared to return to his job in a sewing factory, where he works 14 hours a day for just over half the legal Turkish minimum wage. “Anybody who gets caught now will get sent back – so we’re going back,” said Fahed. “It’s time to forget about Europe.”

Additional reporting: Eiad Abdullatif