Loretta Napoleoni - Merchants of Men: How Jihadists and ISIS Turned Kidnapping and Refugee Trafficking into a Multi-Billion Dollar Business

Copyright 2016 by Loretta Napoleoni

A SEVEN STORIES PRESS FIRST EDITION

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ISBN: 978-1-60980-708-5 ( hardcover )
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In memory of Luigi Bernab

contents

Part

Part 2

Part 3

preface

My research into kidnapping and human trafficking started more than a decade ago. Shortly after 9/11, I began meeting, in several cities around the world, with people involved in anti-terrorism and money laundering. They all agreed that the Patriot Act had prompted the Colombian cartel to establish joint ventures with Italian organized crime to launder their drug revenues in Europe and Asia and to find new routes to bring cocaine to the Old Continent. Venezuela, the infamous Gold Coast of West Africafrom where cargoes of slaves had sailed to Americaand the Sahel became key transhipment areas.

African smugglers soon tapped into this business, carrying cocaine overland. Gao, in Mali, became their main hub. From Gao, cocaine travelled across the Sahara to the Mediterranean shores of Morocco, Algeria, and Libya. From there, a fleet of small boats took the drugs to Europe.

In 2003 a group of former members of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) involved in smuggling in the trans-Saharan regions branched off and kidnapped thirty-two Europeans in Mali and southern Algeria. The hostages were transported along the trans-Sahara contraband routes to camps in northern Mali. The European governments paid rich ransoms to get their citizens back, enough to bankroll a new armed group: al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Among the people I have met since 9/11 are several hostage negotiators. As brokers between the parties, they have unique insight into the kidnapping business. From our conversations, it emerged that the abduction of the thirty-two Europeans proved that snatching Westerners could be an important profit center for criminal and armed organizations. Hunting season for Western hostages was now open.

By the second half of the aughts, a mere five years after 9/11, the cocaine business accelerated the destabilization of the Sahel. Several failed and semi-failed states appeared, prompting their citizens to become economic migrants seeking passage to Europe. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb was quick to invest part of the profits of its kidnapping business into trafficking migrants.

Negotiators believe that the governments failure to publicly denounce the kidnapping crisis in the Sahel prevented any proper intervention in the region. Hence it was easy for the kidnappers to branch off into human trafficking.

As a chronicler of the dark side of the economics of globalization, I discovered that the policy of secrecy on the part of governments sprang from their wish to hide the failings of globalization. The proliferation of failed states and regions where law and order has broken down since the fall of the Berlin Wall provided an opportunity for kidnapping and trafficking to flourish in a way that was historically unprecedented. And the secrecy of the great nations allowed the conflagration to proceed unchecked. It was as if all the firefighters had decided to go on strike during a forest fire.

Leading negotiators and former hostages agree that the supply of valuable prey has been plentiful. For the past twenty-five years a false sense of security about the globalized world has encouraged young, inexperienced members of the First Nations clubI will call them Westerners even though they may be from Tokyo or Santiago as easily as from New York or Copenhagento explore and report from every corner of the global village, as well as to bring aid to populations trapped inside war zones or plagued by political anarchy. These journeymen reporters and humanitarian aid workers have become some of the primary targets of modern kidnappers.

Since 9/11 the number of kidnappings has increased exponentially and so too have the sums demanded for ransom. In 2004, $2 million could free a Western hostage in Iraq. Today over $10 million can be paid. A member of the Italian crisis unit joked that freeing Greta Ramelli and Vanessa Marzullotwo young Italians kidnapped in Syria in 2014 and sold to al Nusracost Italy close to a percentage point of its GDP, 13 million! Equally, the number of private security companies specializing in abduction has multiplied and the cost of employing them has skyrocketed. A decade ago $1,000 was the going rate per day. Today it is $3,000.

Is the economics of kidnapping immune from the laws of economics? Ten years of exceptionally low inflation coupled with strong competition among kidnappers and private security firms should have pushed prices down but instead, they have gone up. The reason is simple: the number of prospective Western hostages is almost infinite, and governments and private negotiators compete with each other to free their own citizens, driving prices up for fixers, informers, drivers, and others.

Today we know that exporting Western democracy to every corner of the global village has backfired. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world has become a much more dangerous place not only for North Americans and Europeans, but also for Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans, millions of whom have been forced to become migrant laborers and economic refugees. As Middle Easterners share this bleak destiny, the core business of hostage takers in this region is shifting again, the focus now being on trafficking people escaping the miseries and depredations of civil war. Today these merchants of men handle a new variety of human cargo: not hostages but rather migrants. A surreal interdependency, therefore, links the kidnapping of Westerners and the trafficking of migrants.

When, in 2015, the migrant crisis erupted in the Middle East, kidnappers and smugglers easily became traffickers. They already had a sophisticated organizational structure in place, and plenty of money from trading hostages to invest in this new venture. Netting about $100 million per month in the summer of 2015, the merchants of men delivered tens of thousand of people per week to European shores. It is a profitable business because demand far outstrips supply, and the cost of reaching Europe keeps rising. Ten years ago someone could pay a smuggler $7,000 to be brought from West Africa to Italy. In the summer of 2015 that sum was the price to cross the short distance from Syria to Turkey to Greece.

Fifteen years after the destruction of the Twin Towers, most of the Muslim world is on fire. The winners are the merchants of men, and a mix of criminal and jihadist groups who snatch, buy, and sell people for a price. What next?

The migrant crisis could force an entire continent to confront the hypocrisy of its own politicians who kept silent when they should most have spoken out, and the absurdity of the myth that we are moving towards an integrated and egalitarian Europe. But above all, it will expose once again the fragility of our respect for human life and our defence of human dignity. The merchants of men are no different from the slave traders of the eighteenth century, the colonizers of the nineteenth century, or the Nazis of the twentieth century: they have all thought that the lives of others are theirs to dispose of freely.