But once home he fled, taking his family with him, and without allowing the Taliban to get their man into the position he wanted. When he arrived in Turkey, he says he phoned back home to an official to tell him of the Taliban plan, to try to stop it from happening. ‘I lost my everything,’ he says. ‘But I am happy to have saved the children’s lives.’ He cannot go back home he says, and ‘If the Greek government deport me I will kill myself.’ What does it mean to be in Europe, I ask him? ‘I am happy to be here because I can be alive here. Because I am safe now,’ he says. Then he turns away. He tries to hide the tears that fall down his face. We sit in silence. Later he shows me some more scars from the Taliban’s torture, on his legs. We shake hands and out on the road we bump into his family. He introduces me to his wife and daughters, the older of whom is wearing a bright pink children’s cap that one of the agencies has obviously given her, and they walk back up to the camp together as a family.

Among the other migrants at the camp in Moria are a pair of brothers from the Ghazni region of south-eastern Afghanistan. They say they are 20 and 18, and are from the Hazara peoples, a minority Shia group who are a particular target of Isis in Afghanistan, the group having carried out mass beheadings of this ‘heretical’ sect. Isis is only the latest worst thing to have happened to their homeland. Before them the Taliban burned down their school and then attempted to recruit the brothers. They say that Isis also tried to recruit them when they moved into the area. Offered the chance by Isis to either ‘join our group or we’ll kill all your family members’, the boys left their village and fled to Kabul. Both their father and mother are ill so they, as the biggest boys, had become responsible for supporting their household.

While we’re sitting on the stony ground of Greece, all the Afghan boys and men who have come to join us play in the dust with their hands. An older man of 62, from the same province as the brothers, has heart trouble but is hoping to join a daughter in Austria. He has come through Iran where there are more Hazara people. If Afghanistan was not safe, could he not have stayed in Iran? ‘I know no one in Iran,’ he says, his eyes filling with tears. ‘What would I do in Iran’? As we speak he gathers up little mounds of dust and fills in holes in the ground. But I notice that the younger of the two brothers, with a dark fringe almost covering his deep dark eyes, picks up small pebbles and repeatedly strikes the ground with them while we talk.