My brother was with me and I didn’t know how to help him. He’s sick with cancer. His medicine has finished. He left his children and wife to go to Europe and find treatment and get well. But they returned him back from the Greek island’. • The Case of Farmakonisi Island R., J. & N., from Syria (Yezidi minority)149/ pushed back from Farmakonisi on 17.8.13 R.: ‘It happened last Sunday (17.8.13). We were five persons - all from Syria. (...) We arrived in a Greek island at around 5-6 o’clock in the morning. It was a military island. There was a small military base, some sheep and soldiers. When we got there we climbed up the street. We heard some sheep and we thought we arrived in a village. We saw the Greek flag and thought that there’s a state there and they will respect us. There was a ‘soldier’ who searched us. He had a beard and very short hair. The first thing this man did was to beat N. who fell on the rocks. He kicked him in the ribs and threw him on the ground. He then went to J. (17 years old) and kicked him and badly hurt his foot. Then he started beating up the two other persons who were with us. (...) In the beginning this ‘soldier’ was alone, but then someone else arrived, another soldier who didn’t beat us. They took all of our things. They ordered us to stay with our hands extended and body searched us. They even searched the hemlines of our clothes. They put us in a small room and they beat us one by one - each one for 15 minutes. They were holding us from our t-shirts so that we could not move and were punching us. They were asking things, but I only speak Arabic, so I couldn’t understand. I told them to speak Arabic with me and they beat me again. They then took us back where we were in the beginning and took off our underwear, one after the other and they beat us with a wooden stick. They kept beating us, until everyone was beaten three times. They then put plastic handcuffs in our hands and left us for seven hours with our hands handcuffed in the back under the sun. 149 | Interviewed in Izmir (Turkey), August 24, 2013 42 | aNNEX-iNTERVIEWS Signs left from the handcuffs. One of the interviewee’s had a black eye, but didn’t want Pro Asyl to document it for obvious reasons (religious minority, suppressed and Greek authorities). | © Pro Asyl N.: I still can’t feel my fingers. Then they took us back to a room and they forced us to stay down, looking at the wall and with our hands handcuffed. After a while we started crying. Someone brought us some water to drink. It was very dirty. We cried loudly and then another soldier came and cut off our handcuffs. A blonde woman with curly hair in military uniform, who appeared to be a doctor, came and asked us whether we need anything. We were so afraid that we just looked her in the eyes and told her: ‘No, we don’t need anything.’ They brought us something to eat but we were so scared, that we didn’t eat. They asked for our names and our nationalities. The man who was writing down our names was bold, tall and thin. He didn’t wear any uniform, but a pair of short pants. We stayed on the island for three days. Every day they would beat us. The situation was very bad. (…) We were crying so much. We couldn’t even go to the toilet, because aNNEX-iNTERVIEWS | 43