Merchants of Men

Every day, a powerful and sophisticated underground business delivers thousands of refugees along the Mediterranean coasts of Europe. A new breed of criminals, risen from the political chaos of post-9/11 Western foreign policy and the fiasco of the Arab Spring, controls it. These merchants of men are intertwined with jihadist organisations such as al Qaeda. Previously, they have prospered from smuggling cocaine from West Africa and kidnapping Westerners. More recently, the destabilisation of Syria and Iraq, coupled with the rise of ISIS, offered them new business opportunities in the Middle East, from selling Western hostages to jihadist groups to trafficking in refugees numbering in the millions, generating billions of dollars annually.