The 5,000km path of least resistance from Afghanistan to Greece: Herat (Afghanistan), Farah (Afghanistan), Nimruz (Afghanistan), Panjgur (Pakistan), Kuhak (Iran), Saravan (Iran), Khash (Iran), Bam (Iran), Kerman (Iran), Yazd (Iran), Naein (Iran), Kashan (Iran), Eslamshahr (Iran), Maku (Iran), Iğdir (Turkey), Istanbul (Turkey), Çeşme (Turkey), and finally Chios (Greece).

Acquiring an Iranian visa is very difficult if you are Afghan. The Iranian government is by now well aware that many Afghans use visas to travel through Iran to Europe. Faced with this reality, Najibullah begins speaking with smugglers in order to find a way to the west. Although the Iranian border is only 124km from Herat, it is too dangerous to attempt a crossing there since Iranian police shoot on sight. Nimruz, Afghanistan, also has a border with Iran, but it is guarded by a long, high wall. The smugglers advise Najibullah that the safest route will take him through Daesh-controlled terroritory in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, before reaching Turkey, and from there, Greece.

Najibullah, his sister, and brother-in-law rent a private taxi to take them from Herat to Farah, where they join others attempting to cross the Pakistan border. At Farah, Najibullah and his family pile into a smuggler’s small, white pick-up truck, alongside 19 other people, to continue on to Nimruz Province. When they reach the Pakistan border, Najibullah pays Daesh 200 Afghani, worth about €2.36 or $2.88, the equivalent of one day’s hard work in this part of the world, for his family’s safe passage across the border. The Daesh fighters let the cars through their checkpoint three at a time. They shine a flashlight in each person’s eyes to look for Hazaras, a people native to central Afghanistan, who, if discovered, are summarily executed. During Daesh’s inspection of the pick-up truck, they rip some rags off of the brake discs. Najibullah suddenly realises that they have travelled for 14 hours and over 180km without brakes. He overhears one Daesh remark to another that a car without brakes crashed at the checkpoint a few days before and killed 48 people.

Once past the Daesh checkpoint, the driver of the pick-up truck waits for the dead of night to have a better chance of avoiding the Pakistan police. He turns off the truck’s lights and creeps very slowly along the road under the light of the moon. Once the truck is some distance inside Pakistan, it pulls off the road and unloads the passengers in the desert where they spend the rest of the night. Pakistani police patrol the roads, but the desert belongs to bandits, smugglers, and their passengers. Najibullah’s contact gives them a password — shaghayegh, the word for a corn poppy flower in Persian— so that they will be able to tell his team of smugglers apart from potential kidnappers. The travellers drink water and eat cookies for dinner. Wolves howl in the brush nearby.

The smuggler returns early the next morning around 6am with two cars. Another car joins the convoy near Pankhurst, Pakistan, on the way to the border with Iran. The cars attempt to cross the Iranian border one at a time, but ten minutes after the first car sets off, Najibullah’s smuggler receives a call on his mobile phone saying that it has been stopped by police and that everyone has been arrested. A heated argument then ensues between Najibullah’s driver, who wants to proceed with the crossing, and the driver of the other car, who wants to turn back. Undeterred, Najibullah’s smuggler offers to go first to see if the crossing is now clear of police. Before leaving, he brandishes his Colt pistol at his passengers, telling them to make absolutely no noise. If they must pray, he says, they should do so in their hearts, and not even make a whisper.

Najibullah’s car approaches the border at a snail’s pace. After what seems like an eternity, the smuggler turns on the headlights and races deeper into the desert. Having managed to evade the border police successfully, the smuggler calls the other driver to tell him to make his attempt. A few minutes later, Najibullah sees his driver smash his phone on the ground—the third car has also been stopped by Iranian police. Najibullah’s car crossed the border between the time it took the police to take the first car to the police station and then to return to their post.

Once inside Iran, the group spend the night in Kuhak, a small village with fewer than 2,000 homes. The danger of being discovered is augmented by the heavy police presence in the frontier town. Najibullah and the other travellers sleep in the smuggler’s accomodation during the day and travel by night, first to Saravan, Khash, and Bam, and then on to Kerman and Yazd. There are ten passengers in the cramped car: one person on the floorboard of the passenger’s seat, one person on the passenger’s seat with their knees folded underneath them, six people across the back seat, and another four lying side by side in the trunk. During a rest stop in Yazd, the smuggler casually tosses a 2kg packet of cocaine that he had hidden under his seat onto the dashboard. Such a large quantity would receive the death-penalty in Iran, and Najibullah has no doubt that if the car had been stopped by police, the smuggler would have blamed one of the passengers for bringing it with them. From Yazd the group travel to Naein, where the driver has them exit the car once they reach the outskirts of the city. Naein is the capital of a province by the same name and there is a large police station in the city. A packed car raises suspicion, so they travel across the city at breakneck speed by motorcycle in two trips, six people at a time. From Naein they travel onto Kashan, and then to Eslamshahr in the outskirts of Tehran. The journey so far as taken 7 days.

The group arrives in Eslamshahr on 11th February, 2016 (22nd of Bahman in the Persian calendar), a day of celebration in Iran commemorating independence from the shah. Order is strictly enforced during the festivities, and the migrants are confined to the smuggler’s house with other travellers for a week. During this time, Najibullah notices a man from another group sitting in the corner of the house crying until his eyes are dry. Najibullah thought the man missed his family at first, but day after day the man does not move from the corner. Najibullah approaches the man to comfort him, and asks him what is troubling him. It transpires that the man came into Iran with his cousin and brother by a different, harder route through the mountains as part of a group of 85 people, mostly women and children. After passing the border, an Iranian-marked attack helicopter stumbled across them while on patrol. The smuggler told the group to hold their children up over their heads to show the helicopter pilot that they are not terrorists. When the helicopter passed over them, the group breathed a sigh of relief, but the helicopter then turned and began an attack run, strafing the group with its guns. The man saw bullets rip through the child his brother was holding up, before going on to hit his brother in the chest. The group scattered to take cover while the helicopter made a third pass to fire at the dead bodies strewn across the desert. The man was desperate to bury his brother’s body, but the other 12 survivors wanted to push on to the car that was waiting for them as quickly as possible. Torn between being left behind, and leaving his brother’s body to be eaten by the wolves he heard howling in the distance, the man was forced to leave his brother’s mangled body in the sand where he had fallen.

While waiting in Eslamshahr, Najibullah befriends another family. The mother of the family had had a surgery recently and was weak from her recovery, and the father was walking with two canes. They had three children with them, two boys and a girl, aged two, four, and six years old. Najibullah decides to help the family and arranges for another smuggler to take them through Maku, Iran, into Turkey. The smuggler tells them that there are two ways to cross at Maku. The first way is through the mountains, and has a 90 per cent chance of success. The second, the smuggler says, is a 30 minute walk, but it only works every other time. Because the family Najibullah is travelling with cannot make it through the mountains, they decide to take the riskier route in order to stay together. At the last moment, the smuggler tells Najibullah that he will not make the crossing with them, breaking the agreement they had made. The smuggler gives them directions to walk for five minutes until they reach a dry river bed. After crossing the riverbed, the smuggler tells them to follow a concrete street until it reaches another river, which he says is only thigh-deep. A car will be waiting for them a short distance from the other riverbank.

After a brief argument, Najibullah decides to go on without the smuggler and follows his directions until the two families reach the riverbed. There they hear voices shouting and a gunfight with automatic weapons. Clouds cover the light of the moon and they take cover in total darkness. When the gunfire stops, they continue along the concrete road until they reach the river. The water is icy from the snowfall and fast-moving. Najibullah takes a two-metre long stick to test the depths up and down the riverbank but cannot find anywhere suitable to cross. Gunfire and shouting again erupt nearby and the families hide in the reeds along the riverbank. A silhouette begins moving towards them out of the darkness. Najibullah fears the worst, but the figure beckons them over—it is another group of about 40 migrants.

The women in the group tie their hijabs together to make a rope, and the men fashion a dingy from a tractor tire tube. The strongest in the group swims across the river to set up a pulley system to cross the river. At one point, a woman falls out of the tube, and without hesitation, Najibullah’s brother-in-law dives into the water to save her life, even though he cannot swim. One of the last women to cross also falls in the water, and this time Najibullah dives in after her, dragging her to shore. Despite these heroic acts, the group refuses to wait for Najibullah and his family, and moves on without them once Najibullah has made it to the other side to hold the rope. Exhausted and freezing, Najibullah and his family take a few minutes to catch their breath. They find the car that is waiting for them and set off for the smuggler’s safehouse in Turkey. Upon arriving at the safehouse, one man from the larger group of 40 people sees Najibullah and approaches him. He tells Najibullah that the group had run into police shortly after leaving him by the riverbank, and that all but five of them were arrested by Turkish police.

After staying in the safehouse for three days, the two families travel by bus to Istanbul on February 21st, 2016. Once in Istanbul, Najibullah agrees to pay a smuggler $3,000 for his family to be taken by boat to Greece. Najibullah has left all of his money with his best friend in Herat because his father cannot move around the city freely without attracting the attention of Taliban. Najibullah calls his friend and tells him to put the funds in escrow at a money shop. The smuggler then makes the first of what will become eight attempts to cross the Chios Straight to Greece. They try to cross at Anatalya, and Bodrum, and Didim, and Dilek, but each time the smuggler is stopped by police while preparing the boat on the beach. It begins to dawn on Najibullah that his smuggler is not a professional, but merely a connection between other smugglers who is trying his hand at making the crossing himself for the first time. Najibullah becomes desperate, however, after his so-called smuggler calls him to tell him that the European Union have signed a deal with Turkey that states that any migrants that arrive in Greece after March 20th, 2016, will be automatically deported back to Turkey. The smuggler says that he has spent all of Najibullah’s money on the eight failed attempts, and he gives Najibullah two choices: either wait until other migrants arrive to pay for a crossing and risk missing the March 20th deadline, or pay him in advance so that he can prepare another boat. Under time pressure from the imminent EU-Turkey deal, Najibullah discusses his options with his father before calling his friend to tell him to release the funds from escrow. The smuggler collects the money, switches off his phone, and is never heard from again.

Unbeknownst to Najibullah, another smuggler was watching their failed attempts. He approaches Najibullah and offers to take him to Chios on March 19th, the day before the deal goes into effect, for $800 per person. Najibullah readily agrees, but the sea is rough on the 19th, making any crossing impossible. On the night of the 20th March, at the last possible moment, the fourth smuggler succeeds in crossing the straight. The boat touches European soil at 11:30pm. Despite his elation at finally arriving in Greece, Najibullah wastes no time celebrating, and rushes to take a taxi from the beach to the island’s migrant camp at Vial. Once he arrives at the camp, he runs to the camp’s office to register before midnight. The office is in a chaotic state, and no one is sure how the law applies to new arrivals in these final minutes. Najibullah has a short interview with Frontex (Europe’s border patrol) to determine his place of origin. The interviewer asks him to speak in his local dialect, and to name the major of Herat, and Herat’s representative in the national government, and to enumerate some local customs. After passing the interview, Najibullah is fingerprinted and photographed. He sees a sign hanging in the office enumerating the process for new arrivals: (1) wait in line, (2) have your interview, (3) have your fingerprints taken, (4) have your photograph taken, and (5) file an application for papers to be able to travel throughout Greece. After being photographed, Najibullah goes to ask for the papers that will allow him to leave Chios, but he is told that it is too late. The deadline has passed and migrants are no longer allowed to leave the island.