We find a ruined building on the seafront in which he tells their story. They came in on a boat that went down twice during what should have been the hour’s journey from Turkey. On the second sinking they were picked up by the Greek coastguard. He is thirty-one years old. He has come with his wife, his two sons and two daughters. The girls are five and one and a half. Handsome, strongly built and with a single quiff of white in the centre of his head of black hair, he is wearing sports clothes he has clearly been given since his arrival. In Afghanistan he had a job in the Ministry of Education with responsibility for schools in the Herat region. As the Taliban regained their strength he received a phone call from them telling him to leave his job. He didn’t and so they kidnapped him and jailed him for three days. While he was there they broke both his hands. Each has large protruding lumps where bone sticks out at the wrists. He says he managed to escape from the jail but, stumbling in the Afghan mountains he injured himself further, breaking his head open on the rocks when he fell.

In two months at home he was unable to work. But after that he did go back to work. At which point the Taliban kidnapped him again. This time they kept him for twenty-one days. They tortured him again (the scars are on his side as well as his arms). They also raped him, or as the Afghan from the camp who acts as our translator puts it, ‘attacked him from the backside’. ‘You know what he means?’ he asks helpfully, making miming signals as the man looks away. Each night the Taliban raped him. While they did so they told him ‘That I no longer had a god. That they were my god and that this meant I must do anything they asked of me.’ At this point he says that he agreed to help them. They told him that they wanted him to use his position to put one of their own men into the education authority. They had a plan to put something into the water system at the schools with 600 to 700 children between the villages of Adraskan and Gozareh. If the children could all be poisoned at school then parents would stop sending their children to school, reasoned the Taliban. Because he agreed to help them this second time they allowed him to go home.