In the moonlight, the raft looked like an empty shell, as black as the Mediterranean, tossed about by the waves, with the Greek island of Lesbos in the distance as its backdrop. In reality, 22 Syrians and Palestinians were crammed on to the derisory piece of rubber, to try their luck setting course for this outpost of the European Union on Tuesday, September 26, only to be violently turned away without setting foot on land. The high-risk, 10 kilometer crossing from the small Turkish tourist town of Ayvalik is the busiest route for migrants in the Aegean Sea.

They were picked up in Greek waters at around 3am by six hooded, armed men, speaking English with an Arabic accent. They first stripped them of their cell phones, passports and other belongings. Then they beat them and forced them into a lifeboat barely 5 meters square. With no engine, water or life jackets, they were pushed back toward the invisible border separating Greece and Turkey. A flagrant case of "pushback" – contrary to international law – which the Athens government has been accused of using systematically for more than three years.

"At least one of the men was Syrian," said Abdo Z, a 20-year-old Syrian. "They were all cruel and knew exactly what they were doing. They're migrants like us, who have become auxiliaries to the Greek police, who use them with the promise of one day letting them escape to northern Europe if they help them. There were also some at the land border near Edirne. I know, I'm on my third attempt."

The young man from Aleppo, who has been registered as an asylum seeker in Turkey since 2015, has travelled a long way. Rescued by a Turkish coastguard shuttle after drifting for more than three hours, he and his companions in misfortune owed their survival only to the goodwill of Ankara's men. "It's a paradox that I don't really understand. At the Syrian border, the Turkish border guards push us back, but here they save us," he said, sitting on the deck of the military ship Le Monde was able to board, wrapped in a blanket provided by the crew.

The day before, on September 25, the TCSG 907 and another intervention vessel in the area rescued 52 migrants, who were also turned back into Turkish territorial waters. Sixteen more were rescued by the coastguard on September 27, again in the middle of the night. Syrians from Idlib and Aleppo were pushed off a Lesbos beach by a Greek police patrol. "They shot in the air to immobilize us, then hit us in all directions and robbed us too, before sending us back out to sea in our boat, not without first removing the gasoline from the engine," said Ibrahim A, 22, who also preferred not to give his full name.

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