A landlocked, hourglass-shaped nation bisected by the Sahel, Mali is both a significant source of Europe-bound migrants and a key transit country for migrants from other African nations, including Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Gambia. In 2012, jihadis briefly overran the northern part of the country before being repulsed by an intervening French military. Today, the backbone of the economy in this vast and lawless expanse in the north is smuggling. Narcotics and weapons, stolen and counterfeit items — billions of dollars’ worth of illicit goods move along ancient caravan routes that crisscross the Sahara each year. So, too, do tens of thousands of West African migrants, who cross the desert to Algeria in the backs of pickup trucks.

Hundreds of miles away in Mali’s semiarid south, remittances, rather than smuggling, are the main source of income. This is where the majority of Malian migrants hail from. Nearly a quarter of the country’s roughly 18 million nationals are thought to live abroad, elsewhere in Africa and in Europe. Experts estimate that the money they send back accounts for roughly 7 percent of GDP. In parts of the south, Western Union is widely seen as more important than development aid. One finds whole villages here with no working-age men. Musicians sing about the heroes of the sea and the sky, and elders whisper about jobless teenage boys who haven’t yet bid their goodbyes. A distant tomb, it is often said, is better than poverty at home.

One such place is Kolondiéba, a sleepy farming community surrounded by towering mango trees, two hours from the nearest paved road, where Spain’s development agency, known as AECID, opened the cashew processing plant last year. The lush, oppressively hot region near Mali’s border with Ivory Coast once had a thriving cashew export industry. But decades of government neglect left the sector a shambles. Now instead of drawing their sustenance from the land, residents depend on remittances from abroad.

Mali’s Migrant Crackdown

Europe has been helping fight the country’s jihadis for years. Now it’s turning its sights on human smugglers.

Rehabilitating the cashew nut sector, development experts at AECID reasoned, could revitalize one of the poorest regions of one of the poorest nations on Earth. “For one U.S. dollar, you can plant one hectare’s worth of trees,” said Francisco Álvaro, an AECID official in Bamako who helped design the project. “You will employ one or two people on that hectare and one or two more on every hectare thereafter. We see potentially 5 million hectares of production in Mali. We are at 100,000 now, so that’s about 2 percent of our potential.”

Álvaro, who is short and excitable with salt-and-pepper hair, talks about cashews with the enthusiasm of an agronomist who has spent years immersed in his subject. The tree is well-suited to the inhospitable climate of the Sahel, he explains, and begins to produce nuts in as few as three years. Once it is mature, it can survive and produce even in a drought, since its roots tunnel as deep as 30 feet in search of ground water. In addition to the nuts, which command ever-higher prices in Europe and the United States, it produces a fruit that can be eaten or turned into juice or wine. Spoiled nuts can be made into soap.

But farmers in Mali have reaped few of the cashew trees’ theoretical benefits. Before Álvaro and his team arrived, most of the fruit was left to rot, and commercial wine- and soap-making were unheard of in places like Kolondiéba. The cashews were exported raw, meaning that middlemen in India and China profited from the shelling and roasting of the nuts.

So at a cost of roughly $7 million, Álvaro and his colleagues at AECID designed a pilot project that would serve as a model for a much larger cashew sector project funded through the EU Trust Fund. They built 10 small packing and storage facilities and one processing plant in Kolondiéba, where an association of women’s collectives operated manual shelling machines and baked the nuts in an industrial-size kiln. AECID also offered the women business training, including instruction on how to find markets for their produce.

Álvaro and his team had run the math: Revenue from the sale of processed cashews should have been enough to pay for the purchase of new raw cashews with a modest profit margin. AECID donated the first 15 tons of unprocessed nuts; after that, the operation was supposed to be self-sustaining. But by early February — before the plant had even processed and sold a single shipment of nuts — the pilot project had stalled.

Employees at the plant had different explanations for what went wrong. Some blamed fluctuations in the price of cashews, which made it difficult to budget for new raw nuts. Others said the problem was the decision to pay workers monthly wages based on the weight of the cashews they processed, a system that resulted in payouts that exceeded the money coming in from sales. The quality of the raw cashews delivered by AECID, a third of which were rotten by the time they could be processed, apparently also played a role. Whatever the proximate cause, it was clear that the women’s collectives — comprising mostly illiterate women but also a few men, like Traoré, who faced tremendous social pressures to migrate — had been left on their own to manage an industrial-scale operation with millions of dollars in assets.

“We can’t self-fund. This [operation] will stop for sure without more assistance,” Awa Touré, the president of the cooperative that manages the plant, told me. “Right now, we are not doing anything because we have no cashews left to process.”

None of the workers had been in contact with AECID since an on-site trainer from the development agency had departed several months previously. Some planned to hold out until more cashews arrived; others were already planning to leave town. “We will wait and see,” said Sangare Konaté, a slender 32-year-old whose colleagues playfully referred to her as la vieille, or “old” one. She has family members all over the world: an aunt in Angola, a brother who migrated to Italy, and another brother in the United States.

Back at the Spanish Embassy in Bamako, Álvaro seemed only vaguely aware of the troubles in Kolondiéba. “I don’t have all the details, but I think they have preferred to share the money. They should have saved it,” he said of the workers there. “The problem here is a cultural one. If you have money, you spend it all — it’s the same everywhere in Africa. People here don’t prepare for the future. There is an incapacity to save.”

When I asked whether the European Commission had requested to see the results of AECID’s pilot project before awarding the development agency roughly $15 million to scale it up, Alvaro said no. “Their first concern was the speed of the execution,” he said. “They didn’t ask anything about the quality of the implementation.”

Carlos Martin Ruiz de Gordejuela, a spokesman for the European Commission, said in an email that the results of a 2015 evaluation of the AECID pilot — carried out before the Kolondiéba plant was operational — had been considered as part of the decision to fund the agency’s new cashew project. He added that “knowledge acquired during the [pilot] project, the experience of the EU and other stakeholders, and the very high number of meetings and exchanges since the start of the [project] identification process” had also been considered. Price fluctuations in the international market for cashews, he allowed, had played a role in the “temporary inactivity” of the Kolondiéba plant.

To secure funding through the EU Trust Fund, development agencies like AECID must submit detailed project proposals that are evaluated in Brussels and by the EU delegation in the country where the project will be implemented. The screening process is rigorous, EU officials say, even though they acknowledge that there is tremendous pressure to get programs off the ground that might help ease the migration crisis.

“I can tell you that if the EU is spending money, even if we have to do it quick, fast, and sensible, we have always a control on what we are doing. It’s money of the taxpayers, so we have an evaluation and control,” said Losada, the EU’s special representative for the Sahel. Still, Losada acknowledged that the need to have an immediate impact has made it impossible to tailor each project to specific community needs. “We cannot do urgency, [act] immediately, and then to go case by case, problem by problem. We have to try to have a big impact, an immediate impact. That’s the philosophy of the Trust Fund,” he said.

The result is that virtually all of the grants have gone to European development agencies like AECID instead of to the Malian government or to Malian organizations. To support entrepreneurs in the south of the country, the EU has turned to France’s development agency. To aid impoverished communities in the north, it has contracted the Dutch development agency. In addition to revitalizing the cashew sector, Spain’s development agency has received funding to help reintegrate migrants who have returned to Mali.

“Out of 200 million euros from the Trust Fund, not one penny is being managed by the Malian government or by Malian nongovernmental organizations,” said Boulaye Keita, a technical counselor to the minister for Malians abroad, who was the main government point person for projects financed through the Trust Fund. “Some of these projects are drafted by people in Paris who have never been to the regions we are talking about. They have no idea what is happening there.”

Rotten nuts at the cashew processing plant in Kolondiéba.

European organizations have in some cases partnered with local organizations, and the EU-funded projects are often coordinated with the Malian government. But the overwhelming dominance of European agencies has contributed to a sense that Malians themselves are not benefiting from these programs.

“This is European aid for Europeans,” said Ousmane Diarra, the president of the Malian Association for Deportees, a Bamako-based organization that supports Malians who have been deported from abroad. Diarra told me that his organization has repeatedly sought EU funding for an agricultural development project. “If I come partnered with a European, then maybe they will finance me. But if I come alone as an African, no,” he said.

European diplomats say they are forced to partner with big development agencies because Malians lack the capacity to implement projects on the scale of those being approved through the EU Trust Fund. They also point to rampant corruption within the Malian government, which ranks in the bottom half of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, as a reason to channel money toward European development agencies.

“Very often [with] local NGOs, to be honest, to have them as a contract partner for a big contract, you run into issues of fiduciary risks of lack of management capacity. So our taxpayers also want us to be sure that we know where the money is spent and we can justify every bit of it,” Jolke Oppewal, the Dutch ambassador in Mali, told me. “But I think with the [EU Trust Fund] we could do better in the sense of having more Malian engagement.”

Four months after work ceased at the Kolondiéba plant, AECID made its first trip there to assess what had gone wrong. The agency was planning a second visit, “more oriented to make a support plan to improve their operation,” Álvaro told me in an email dated June 3. When a photographer for Foreign Policy returned to the plant in July, the facility was still shuttered; a lone security guard watched over the deserted grounds. Unused equipment, some of it damaged, was stacked against the wall. Traoré had gone to Bamako to study law after an uncle offered to pay the $2.90 in monthly rent for a single room he now shares with two other young men in a slum on the outskirts of the city.

Undaunted, AECID was moving ahead with its new $15 million project, funded through the EU Trust Fund, that aims to build new cashew processing centers across southern Mali and train hundreds of local residents to work at them. Together with Mali’s Ministry of Agriculture, AECID plans to plant thousands of hectares of cashew trees.

Properly managed, it could revitalize a key sector of the economy and have positive, trickle-down effects on as many as 200,000 people. Whether that happens will depend at least in part on AECID’s ability to learn from the failure of its pilot project. Álvaro told me in February that he was already applying some of these lessons to the new project: Salaries won’t be paid out until operating costs are covered, he said, and he is considering hiring Spanish or Chinese businessmen to manage the new plants. Depending on whom one asks, that will either improve the quality of management or reinforce the notion that foreigners are the main beneficiaries.

Either way, experts are doubtful that this or any other development project aimed at creating jobs can reverse, or even slow, the tide of emigration. “If the success of your policy is dependent on being able to defeat both market forces and human nature, your chances of success aren’t good,” said Kathleen Newland, a senior fellow and co-founder of the Migration Policy Institute.

Michael Clemens, an economist at the Center for Global Development in Washington, has studied the interplay between development and migration for years. He has found that development gains, far from keeping young people at home, are associated with increased migration — until a country attains a per capita income of roughly $7,500 (or three times that of Mali). “There’s this idea that development and migration substitute for each other that underlies all of this. That if we can just make a sufficiently successful industrial park in Ethiopia, that people will go work there and migration will end,” Clemens said. “That ignores the many, many ways in which migration and development complement each other.”

Siaka Koné, the lone security guard at the Kolondiéba plant, makes his rounds of the deserted buildings in July.

Not only does more income mean people can do more expensive things, like pay a smuggler thousands of dollars to take them to Europe; it typically means more education and bigger aspirations. That’s why Clemens says on average as countries transition from poor to middle-income, they experience a “dramatic rise” in migration. Over the very long term, it is true that development would depress migration as a country transitions to developed status. “But Mali is not going to be a developed country in our lifetime or in the lifetime of our children,” he said. “The reality is that the development of nations is measured in generations.”

The Deported

Europe is expelling thousands of Africans. To one Malian deportee, that looks like a recipe for revolution.

Young people are not given to waiting for improvements measured in generations. In the next three decades, Mali’s population will more than double to roughly 45 million. Across sub-Saharan Africa, according to Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh of the University of California-San Diego, some 800 million working-age people will enter the labor force — more than the current population of Europe. This massive demographic bulge is itself proof of development success; infant mortality rates have plummeted across the continent while birth rates have dipped only slightly. But it is also proof that more development aid won’t slow migration, at least not for many years.

The EU and member states already spend roughly $24 billion on development and other aid in Africa each year, but the exodus of young men continues. Much of the funding disbursed through the EU Trust Fund is “more of the same, but it’s now more explicitly linked to the goal of reducing migration,” said Bram Frouws, the policy and research coordinator at the Danish Refugee Council’s Global Mixed Migration Secretariat. “Our expectations in terms of reducing migration have to be very modest,” he said, especially if corruption and poor governance remain problems in these countries. Frouws pointed to West Africa, where most countries are “relatively stable and growing economically.” Yet, he added, “more and more West Africans seem to be trying to migrate to Europe.”

From his new home in a corner of Bamako where ambition tends to outpace opportunity, Traoré still thinks about traveling to Europe, though it feels farther away than ever. He and his roommates, a chauffeur and an electrician, share a single mattress on the floor of their one-room flat. Sweaters and trousers hang from pegs on the walls. A coral pink blanket is the only color in the otherwise drab, windowless room. The university is nearly an hour away, across a stagnant stream that doubles as a sewer and along wide, dusty streets crowded with honking scooters and yellow Mercedes-Benz taxis from the 1970s. He can’t always afford the trip, so he misses a lot of classes. If suddenly he found himself with money to spare, though, he knows he wouldn’t waste it on getting to school.

Nichole Sobecki contributed reporting to this story.

Ty McCormick (@TyMcCormick) is Foreign Policy’s Africa editor. Nichole Sobecki (@nicholesobecki) is a photographer based in Nairobi.

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Mali’s Migrant Crackdown

Europe has been helping fight the country’s jihadis for years. Now it’s turning its sights on human smugglers.

Next

The Deported

Europe is expelling thousands of Africans. To one Malian deportee, that looks like a recipe for revolution.

Until a little more than a year ago, Agadez was the epicenter of massive waves of migration from Africa that began in 2011, when the fall of Libya’s dictatorship opened a clear path through weak and failing states to Europe’s southern border. In 2016, a record 181,000 people arrived on Italy’s Mediterranean coast. Most of them were sub-Saharan Africans fleeing poverty, war, and oppression. More than half of them likely traveled through Agadez on their way.

Comprising a dense warren of mud-brick compounds that bear the same shade of cocoa brown as the surrounding Sahara, Agadez has been a place of exchange for more than 600 years. Like Timbuktu in neighboring Mali, it was a center of Islamic learning in the Middle Ages and an important transit point for caravan traders. But whereas the cargo of old was gold, salt, and slaves, now it is weapons, narcotics, and migrants. The trade touches almost everyone in the city, whether they are directly involved or living off the service industries that have developed around it. Grocers, hoteliers, the police — all of them are to some extent dependent on this illicit flow of people and goods. Before the crackdown began, the Nigerien army openly escorted the smugglers’ convoys into the desert in exchange for a share of the profits. Sometimes hundreds of Toyota Hiluxes loaded down with young men made the crossing in a single day.

In its heyday as a smugglers’ paradise, from 2013 to 2016, Agadez was crawling with profiteers who had money to burn. They would flock to the bars and nightclubs, Tuaregs and Toubous in flowing traditional jalabias mixing with Nigeriens of other ethnicities in high-tops and skinny jeans, dancing and draining $4 cans of Heineken until the call to prayer echoed through the city at dawn. But when I visited in May, the city no longer felt like a freewheeling frontier boomtown. Market stalls sat empty in the 110-degree heat while drivers lounged all day in their yellow three-wheeled taxis without scoring a fare. The nightclub at the Hotel de la Paix, a garish modern fortress rumored to have been financed by Muammar al-Qaddafi, still opened each night around midnight, the purr of a diesel generator audible over the rollicking pulse of Tuareg music. But every time I went in, the place was mostly empty.

The city of Agadez, located at the gateway to the Sahara in northern Niger, has been a place of exchange since the Middle Ages. Now it is at the heart of the human-smuggling trade.

The collapse of Agadez’s economy was just one of the unintended consequences of Europe’s bid to halt the flood of unwanted migrants and refugees toward its shores. In 2015, as the European Union was struggling to cope with what would amount to a record 1.3 million asylum-seekers that year — a 122 percent increase from 2014 — EU officials held a series of emergency talks with African leaders. In November of that year, they announced a $1.9 billion EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa designed to combat the root causes of migration, including poverty and conflict. The EU also struck bilateral agreements with several African countries that migrants depart from and travel through on their way to Europe, aiming to strengthen border controls and disrupt smuggling networks. It designated Niger a priority country as part of a partnership framework agreement it made with the government in 2016, paving the way for a pledge of $633 million in exchange for stopping the flow of migrants through its borders.

In addition to funding development projects designed to wean the economy off trafficking, the EU, along with some of its member states, delivered training and equipment to Niger’s security forces to help them clamp down on smugglers. Soon the same army that once escorted smugglers to Libya was putting them behind bars to be sentenced under a new anti-trafficking law passed with the encouragement of European governments.

From behind a broad wooden desk stacked with files, Yahaya Godi, then the secretary-general for the governorate of Agadez, explained his government’s abrupt change of heart. “We must fight against migration and human trafficking because it has many consequences,” he told me. “For instance, there is insecurity. It may also be connected to terrorism or the traffic in weapons.”

Surrounded on all sides by conflict and instability — the country shares borders with Nigeria, Mali, and Libya, all of which harbor significant terrorist threats — Niger has positioned itself as a key counterterrorism partner for Western nations, including the United States and France, both of which have military bases in the country. As a result, it has received hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance from those nations. The migration crisis has presented Niger with a similar opportunity to line its coffers, and it has happily adopted Europe’s view of human smugglers as a threat to regional stability.

“It’s very impressive how they fight for security,” said Ambassador Raul Mateus Paula, the head of the EU delegation in Niger, when I went to see him in Niamey, the capital. “This is very, very important because they are in the middle of problems: Libya, Mali, and Nigeria. So they have to increase dramatically their security expenditures. That’s one of the reasons why the European Union is making a huge effort of budget support.”

Paula seemed pleased with the government’s efforts to halt migration so far. He pointed to the dramatic drop in migrants recorded transiting through Niger en route to Libya and Algeria, key jumping-off points to Europe, as evidence that the partnership is working. Between February and May 2016, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which has received funding from the EU to open transit centers where migrants are encouraged to return home, recorded 116,347 “outgoing” migrants in Niger. During the same period this year, it recorded less than a quarter of that number. In press releases, the EU has touted the number of smugglers arrested and trucks impounded by authorities. “I think that they made very, very important reforms,” Paula said. “And I think we have to keep working with them, support them, to fight terrorism [and] traffickers.”

The actual impact of Europe’s intervention in Niger is less clear. Since the crackdown began, smugglers have mostly stopped passing through established outposts and way stations, including those where IOM monitors the flow of migrants. This raises the possibility that the organization is underestimating the number of migrants still passing through Niger, perhaps by a significant margin. That possibility seems even more likely in light of the data on migrants who actually make it across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy. As of Sept. 5, IOM reported that nearly 100,000 migrants had arrived in Italy this year from North Africa, more than half of them originally from West Africa, meaning that it’s likely they passed through Niger on their way. An estimated 400,000 additional migrants are currently stranded in Libya, caged in squalid detention facilities and prevented from making the dangerous sea voyage by militias in the pay of European nations.

What is clear is that Niger’s EU-funded crackdown has heightened the risks for smugglers, as well as for migrants. One of those who paid a price for defying the authorities was Garba Hamani, a coxeur, or connection man, who was arrested last year as he loaded 49 migrants into trucks. They were eventually released and taken to the IOM transit center, but Hamani spent nine months and 20 days behind bars. He said the jail in Agadez was filled with people connected to the migrant trade — smugglers, drivers, and coxeurs like him. But the smuggling business hasn’t stopped; it’s just been driven deeper underground. “You cannot stop this thing. If the government stops people here, they will just go another way,” he said.

Slideshow: My Smuggler, My Savior

They’re migrants’ only chance of making it safely across the Sahara. They’re also outlaws engaged in a deadly game of cat and mouse with Niger’s military.

The new routes are both longer and more dangerous, according to nearly a dozen drivers I interviewed in Agadez. Some pass through mountainous regions outside the city before crossing vast stretches of desert. Some hug the border with Chad. One area where many of the new routes converge is in a desolate region some 20 miles outside of Dao Timmi, an old military installation in the far north of the country. Here, the trucks slow to a crawl and pass single file through a minefield that dates back to an uprising by ethnic Toubous in the 1990s. Used for years by weapons and drug smugglers because authorities stayed away, the route is now commonly taken by migrants. “They made it a crime, so now it follows the criminal routes,” Hamani said.

Ali, who like most of the smugglers I spoke with asked to be identified by only his first name, started taking the road through the minefield soon after the crackdown started last year, a few months before his deadly nighttime crash. So did Laminou, a muscle-bound 25-year-old with short dreadlocks. Laminou deals in cars, specifically stolen cars from Libya that he smuggles in without papers. One day, he came upon a nightmarish scene: the obliterated remains of a pickup truck surrounded by the dead bodies of multiple migrants. “We couldn’t tell them apart. It’s one man’s leg, one man’s arm — all black,” he said. He and another driver did their best to bury the remains. Then they prayed together and set off again in their trucks.

No one knows how many migrants have died in the desert. Trucks get lost, break down, or are attacked by bandits all the time. Often, nobody finds out until another driver happens upon the human remains. “We know that many people are dying in the Mediterranean. But many are dying in the desert as well, and we have not many statistics,” Paula said.

Sheriff Sonko sits inside the migrant ghetto in Agadez where he has been stranded for the last eight months. He left Gambia without telling his parents so they couldn’t try to talk him out of making the dangerous journey to Europe, but he ran out of money in Niger and is waiting for a family member to send more so that he can continue on to Libya.

In addition to being more dangerous, the new routes are also more expensive. Where it once cost around $300 to travel to the next staging post in Libya from Agadez, it now costs more than double that amount. As a result, many more migrants are finding themselves stuck in the squalid compounds known as “ghettos” that smugglers have set up in secret locations throughout the city. This was the predicament Sheriff Sonko had been facing for the past nine months. A baby-faced 21-year-old, he left Gambia without telling his parents so they couldn’t try to talk him out of making the journey. But he hadn’t counted on the price of crossing the Sahara to skyrocket overnight. “If my parents don’t pay, I won’t leave here,” he told me.

Increasingly raided by the authorities, who arrest the smugglers and turn the migrants over to IOM, the ghettos are getting smaller, and they are constantly being moved so they won’t be discovered. Gaining access to the one where Sonko was living took days of negotiation because the smugglers feared I would be followed or would otherwise inadvertently reveal its location. The day I visited the half-finished compound in a largely abandoned neighborhood on the farthest margins of the city, just four other migrants besides Sonko were there — two from Cameroon and two from Guinea. A group of 29 West Africans had departed for Libya the night before. The structure itself was crumbling and covered with a thick dusting of sand. The dirt floors were bare except for a few empty water bottles, plastic bags, and a broken sandal — the detritus of an unknown number of previous inhabitants. On the walls, migrants had scribbled phone numbers, presumably of family members, drivers, and coxeurs. In one corner, someone had left a message in block letters: “The road of success never smooth.”

New routes pose new risks for those who attempt to ply them. But just as dangerous is the climate of fear that has settled over the Sahara in the wake of the crackdown. Ali blames himself for the deaths of the two migrants killed in the crash. But he also feels resentment toward the EU for having forced him to drive with his headlights off. “When they arrest you, that’s not a law coming from here,” Ali said. “That’s a law coming from Europe.”

When faced with the choice between ensuring their own freedom and saving their human cargo, many drivers choose freedom. Sometimes that means leaving migrants behind in the middle of the desert and speeding off to avoid a military patrol. According to Azaoua Mahaman, an IOM official based in Agadez, more and more migrants are being abandoned in this way. Since the beginning of the year, he said in May, IOM had worked with Nigerien authorities to facilitate nearly a dozen rescue operations. “The main reason we see abandoned migrants is because of the patrols,” he told me. “[The smugglers] are afraid of going to prison, so they drop the migrants and flee.”

This is hardly an irrational response. Unverified reports that the military has opened fire on migrant vehicles have circulated widely. Three different drivers told me that they knew of such incidents, though none had been present when they occurred.

Migrants prepare to make the dangerous three-day journey from Agadez to Libya in the bed of a Toyota pickup truck.

One migrant was there when soldiers lit up a vehicle carrying two dozen passengers: In April, a slender 21-year-old Nigerian named Yinka was traveling through the desert in the back of a Hilux when suddenly gunshots rang out. Bullets shredded the tires beneath her and punched through the side of the vehicle. One hit her friend in the stomach, and she doubled over. Auntie Biola, as the six other women traveling together from Nigeria’s Oyo state called her, bled to death as Nigerien soldiers looked on.

The driver fled the scene, and the migrants were all taken into custody. But first, the soldiers, who Yinka said were wearing uniforms, beat them all and raped the six surviving women. She said they were beaten and raped again when they arrived at the police station in Madama, one of the last settlements before the Libyan frontier. Because the other survivors of this ordeal had all been repatriated to Nigeria by the time I met Yinka in the IOM transit center in Agadez, I was unable to verify her claims. But her account was consistent with testimony from other migrants at the center and with reports by rights groups on abuses, including rapes, committed by the Nigerien military as recently as 2007. Niger’s military and its ministries of defense and interior did not respond to written requests for comment; Paula, the EU ambassador, told me that he was not aware of any reports of abuse. “The traffickers,” he said, “are the real criminals.”

Most Nigeriens would disagree. Smugglers — known as passeurs, or “ferrymen” — are widely regarded as providing a vital service. (Migrants who send home remittances are seen as heroes in this part of the world.) Still, passeurs are often involved in other forms of criminal activity — weapons and drugs, for instance — and now many of them are out of work. The crackdown hasn’t stopped the flow of migrants, but it has diverted much of the human traffic away from Agadez and pushed most of the profits toward smugglers with the highest appetite for risk. For those who are still making the trip, the EU has laid out a feast. For everyone else, it’s famine.

“Today, [illegal migration] generates more money than before,” Rhissa Feltou, the mayor of Agadez, told me. But the profits go to “small mafia groups” instead of to a broad cross-section of society as they did before. The new policy, while necessary in his view, means that Agadez will suffer because its residents have historically been dependent on smuggling.

The EU has pledged to fund job trainings and other development projects to help former smugglers transition to new careers. But the crackdown commenced more than a year ago, and former drivers, coxeurs, and ghetto owners all said in May that they had yet to receive any assistance. (The EU said the programs were on track and that the job trainings would begin soon.)

“We are very angry with the EU because they promised to help us. We even declared that we stopped the job,” said Mohamed, a lean, weather-beaten man in his early 40s who used to run a lucrative migrant ghetto out of his home. “But the promises have not been met. They have destroyed the life of Agadez.”

Mohamed stands in the ruins of his old house, out of which he used to run a lucrative migrant ghetto.

Eighteen months ago, Mohamed was moving more than 300 migrants a week through his ghetto, for a weekly profit of around $10,000 to $13,000. Business was so good that he decided to knock his house down and build a bigger one so that he could fit more migrants in his courtyard. But before the new house was finished, the crackdown was underway, and he was forced to take his business underground.

Today, he lives with his wife and children in a single room in the courtyard of his younger brother’s house in Agadez’s old town, not far from the ancient mosque whose conical minaret towers over the rest of the low-slung city. Mohamed comes from noble Tuareg lineage, and his older brother was once a famous musician in Agadez. (Posters of the brother in traditional Tuareg dress hung from the walls of the compound, alongside a framed photograph of Qaddafi in aviators and a flowing headdress.) But the family appeared to have fallen on hard times; goats pranced through the living space, and pigeons clucked from inside a coop made of mud and straw.

“The way I live now and the way I lived one year ago is very different,” Mohamed said, leading me out of the compound and across a narrow alleyway between crumbling mud walls to a larger, half-finished complex made of rectangular brown bricks. A stray dog roused itself from a sandy depression to snarl at us and then slunk off into a corner. This was once his home, he explained, and where he had made a small fortune housing migrants before they were smuggled to Libya.

He told me that he would wait to see if anything comes of the promised job training programs, but he doubts that kind of legitimate work would ever pay as much as he earned running a migrant ghetto. Many of the smugglers he knows have already gotten back into the game, including his third brother, who was arrested in a sting operation by authorities in May. “Some people will try and get caught. Others will take the dangerous routes and die,” Mohamed said. “This migration business, anyone who has experienced it can never leave it.”

Ty McCormick (@TyMcCormick) is Foreign Policy’s Africa editor. Nichole Sobecki (@nicholesobecki) is a photographer based in Nairobi. A version of this article originally appeared in the September/October 2017 issue of FP magazine.

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The Deported

Europe is expelling thousands of Africans. To one Malian deportee, that looks like a recipe for revolution.

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Slideshow: My Smuggler, My Savior

They’re migrants’ only chance of making it safely across the Sahara. They’re also outlaws engaged in a deadly game of cat and mouse with Niger’s military.

It was already among the most dangerous commutes on Earth. To make the 600-mile journey from Agadez, an ancient Nigerien caravan city that has grown into Africa’s most notorious human-smuggling hub, across the Sahara to Libya was to risk death at the hands of bandits, terrorists, and the elements. Unknown thousands of migrants — and the smugglers who shuttle them — have perished of thirst or exposure in the desert after their trucks broke down or got lost. Then in 2015 the journey became even more perilous. “The army started hunting us,” says Adji, who at 32 had been ferrying migrants to Libya for nearly 15 years. “They are even shooting at our trucks.”

The EU-funded crackdown on Niger’s smuggling industry didn’t stop the flow of Libya-bound migrants. But it did force drivers like Adji to take new and more dangerous routes across the Sahara. “The distance is now twice what it was before and so are the risks,” says Adji, whose truck was hijacked by bandits as he traveled along a new route in 2016. He barely survived, walking for miles in the desert before stumbling across another migrant caravan. For the sake of his wife and children, Adji says he has left the trade, but those who are still willing to make the trip can expect profits even bigger than before. The cost of crossing to Libya has skyrocketed, he says, and for the right price there will always be someone willing to go.

Ali, left, had made the perilous trip to Libya more than 100 times. But after Niger’s government struck a deal with the European Union to crack down on human smuggling, he began taking longer and more dangerous routes across the desert. A few months later, he crashed into a gully at night, upending the vehicle and killing two of the 25 Nigerian migrants on board. Adji, right and at the top of this page, used to make his living driving migrants across the Sahara to Libya before the EU-funded crackdown on human smuggling made it too risky.

Nine months ago, Kader was driving a truck full of migrants to Libya when he came across a military checkpoint. He fled into the desert to avoid arrest, leaving the migrants and his vehicle.

Eighteen months ago, Mohamed was moving more than 300 migrants a week through his ghetto for a profit of about $10,000 to $13,000. But then the crackdown happened, and he was forced to take his business underground.

A former coxeur, Garba, left, was arrested last year as he loaded 49 migrants into trucks. He spent more than nine months in prison. Omar, right, used to drive migrants from Agadez to Libya at least twice a month but says fewer migrants are coming now and it takes longer and longer to fill a car with enough people to warrant making the increasingly dangerous journey.

Moussa was a driver for migrants traveling to Libya. After Nigerien authorities began cracking down on smugglers, he applied to an EU-funded program designed to help former smugglers transition to new careers but says he has yet to receive any financial support.

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Highway Through Hell

The human-smuggling route across the Sahara may have been the deadliest on Earth. Then the EU paid Niger’s army to shut it down — and made it even more treacherous.

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Nearly There, but Never Further Away

Europe has outsourced the dirty work of border control to Libyan militias. In doing so, it has turned African migrants into commodities to be captured, sold, and traded like slaves. (COMING THURSDAY)

Europe once had a reliable partner in combating illegal migration from Libya in Muammar al-Qaddafi, who ruled from 1969 to 2011. The North African country had long been a gateway to Europe for migrants and asylum-seekers, its shores just 200 miles across the Mediterranean from the Italian island of Lampedusa. Ever the extortionist, Qaddafi — who once warned that he was the only thing preventing Europe from becoming “black” — struck a deal with Italy in 2008 to stem the flow of migrants as part of a $5 billion reparations package meant to atone for three decades of brutal colonial occupation that ended in 1943.

Then the Arab Spring swept across North Africa. The chaos that followed Qaddafi’s demise proved an inviting climate for smugglers, and within a few years Libya had become an unsupervised highway for migrants and asylum-seekers headed to Europe. More than 500,000 migrants have reached Italy via what experts call the “Central Mediterranean route” from North Africa since 2014, the vast majority of whom embarked from Libya. Despite a mysterious lull in migrants taking this route since mid-July, reportedly because a new Libyan militia has begun stopping migrant boats west of Tripoli, nearly 100,000 people have crossed via the Central Mediterranean route in the first nine months of this year. Since 2014, almost 13,000 migrants have perished at sea along this route.

Nearly six years after Qaddafi’s death, Libya has two main rival governments — one in Tripoli and the other in the eastern city of Tobruk — and thousands of square miles of territory controlled by a mosaic of tribal factions, militias, armed groups, and the Islamic State. Even in the capital, where the U.N.-backed Government of National Accord is based, masked men in military fatigues, part of an ever-shifting array of alliances, guard checkpoints by day and exchange gunfire by night. Street-by-street gun battles and tit-for-tat kidnappings are the norm, often serving as proxy battles for larger power struggles that reverberate all the way back to tribal enclaves hundreds of miles away.

Abd al-Rahman Milad, more commonly known as “Bija,” discusses his improbable rise to Libyan coast guard commander at a cafe in the coastal city of Zawiya.

Unable to rely on a strongman like Qaddafi to keep migrants from departing Libyan shores, Europe has gone in search of new partners, including the ethnic and tribal militias that are now the de facto authorities in most of the country. Many of these militias are nominally allied with the U.N.-backed government led by Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, whose control barely extends beyond the parking lot of its headquarters in central Tripoli. Technically, these armed groups fall under the authority of the Interior Ministry, but in practice they answer to no one.

Some of these militias used to profit from the migrant trade, either by offering protection to smugglers or by smuggling migrants themselves. Now as they position themselves as potential partners to Europe in the fight against illegal migration, they have begun intercepting migrant boats at sea, raiding migrant safe houses, carrying out mass roundups in immigrant neighborhoods, and opening detention centers throughout the country. Many are still involved in other illegal activities such as fuel smuggling and trafficking arms, narcotics, and stolen goods, but EU-funded agencies continue to train their foot soldiers and offer them material assistance in the hope of building a professional coast guard that can clamp down on smugglers at sea.

One such character is Abd al-Rahman Milad, more commonly known as “Bija,” a powerful militia leader-turned-coast guard commander in the coastal town of Zawiya who has allegedly continued to profit from multiple smuggling operations even as he sells himself as a viable EU partner by intercepting migrants at sea. Over cups of coffee and Marlboro Reds at a local cafe in Zawiya, he told the story of his meteoric rise from a newly minted coast guard academy graduate in 2011, just before the revolution that overthrew Qaddafi, to the man who controls the seas outside the city’s strategic port and oil refinery. He had the right combination of tribal alliances and seafaring skills, he said. But Bija’s ascent also involved something common to many of Libya’s post-Qaddafi success stories: a willingness to simply seize what he wanted. “I took control of this port in Zawiya because at the time there was no one doing the job,” he said.

Libyan security forces prepare to process migrants who were intercepted by the Libyan navy.

Now that his militia has been recognized as a coast guard unit, Bija is an official agent of the U.N.-backed government in Tripoli. But a recent report by the U.N. Panel of Experts on Libya accuses Bija of working with migrant smugglers in the key smuggling hubs of Sabratha and Zuwara — intercepting only the smugglers backed by rival militias. The human cargo his men corral is then delivered to the Nasr detention center in Zawiya, which is run by a militia he is allied with. The report also criticizes his tactics, which allegedly include “the sinking of migrant boats using firearms.”

Bija denies these allegations and claims they were invented by his rivals, including powerful officials in Tripoli, who fed the U.N. false information in an effort to discredit him. He tells the story of an incident in 2014, when he intercepted a Russian vessel smuggling fuel inside Libyan waters. According to Bija, navy officials in Tripoli ordered him to release the ship and its crew. He refused initially but relented after the officials implied they might back Bija’s local rivals in an effort to oust him. “I have had problems with them [the navy] since that day,” he told me. “But I have never stopped my work, and I am doing what I consider is correct and right.”

The fact that Bija is a controversial figure, however, has not stopped European countries from developing a relationship with him. In May, Bija traveled to Rome to participate in an EU-funded workshop hosted by IOM at the four-star Hotel Clodio, where he met with Italian officials as part of an effort to enhance cooperation on migration. More recently, he said, the Italian government provided him with a new boat to intercept migrants at sea, a picture of which he posted on Facebook with him aboard, smiling for the camera. According to Bija, the Italians have told him more boats are on the way.

Ray, the EU spokeswoman, said she was unaware of any evidence linking EU-trained coast guards to ongoing smuggling operations. “We take your allegations seriously,” she said in an email, adding that the “EU is providing the training because everything that happens within Libyan territorial waters is a Libyan responsibility, not a European one, but this does not mean that we turn a blind eye on it.”

Traveling to Bija’s fiefdom in Zawiya, along the 30-mile stretch of coastal road that connects the city with Tripoli, requires passing through a half-dozen checkpoints, many of which are controlled by militias whose loyalties and ideologies are as opaque as their motives. The road is often closed, and on days that it is open, one hopes not to attract the attention of bored young men with guns, many of whom are prone to kidnapping Libyans as well as foreigners.

The main road in Zawiya, like most urban centers along the Libyan coast, bears the scars of war. Control of this slice of western Libya — where fortunes are made smuggling fuel, weapons, narcotics, and people — can be extraordinarily lucrative, which explains why rival groups have reportedly put a bounty on Bija’s head. One group that has been a steadfast ally of Bija is the Nasr Brigade, which has spent much of the last year fighting alongside Bija’s coast guard to maintain control over Zawiya and its territorial waters. Led by Mohammad Koshlaf, the Nasr Brigade also controls the Nasr detention center, which is filled with the men, women, and children Bija’s men have intercepted at sea.

Set among pockmarked facades and structures hollowed out by heavy artillery in Zawiya’s industrial zone, the detention center is a sprawling concrete-and-sheet-metal monument to inhumanity. The main hanger is reserved for male inmates, who are packed inside windowless cells for all but a few minutes each day. The only view to the outside is through a single square-foot slot that guards slam shut at their whim. As I passed by, detained migrants reached their hands out and pleaded with me to contact their embassies and take down the numbers of loved ones back home.

The center’s padlocked doors were decorated with stickers from IOM, the European Union, the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR), and the International Medical Corps, a nonprofit that specializes in humanitarian relief. Representatives from all of these organizations have visited the center and, in the case of IOM and the International Medical Corps, provided hygiene kits and basic medical services with funding from European countries. The militiamen who run the center point to these decals not only as evidence of the quality of their work but of their burgeoning partnership with the EU and the broader international community.

Migrants who find themselves stuck in places like the Nasr detention center often languish there for months. One way out is through “assisted voluntary return and reintegration,” or AVRR, which European policymakers are eager to promote. Funded by the European Union and member states, and overseen by IOM, the program helps migrants return to their home countries on chartered flights. But to be eligible a migrant’s home country must confirm his or her identity, a complicated process made even more difficult by insecurity in Libya. As of the beginning of August, an overwhelmed IOM had repatriated just 4,346 migrants from detention centers in 2017, a fraction of the estimated 400,000 migrants currently stranded in Libya. (The real number could be much higher, since new centers are sprouting up all the time and in parts of the country that are often impossible for aid workers to access.)

The Savior’s Dilemma

Are naval search-and-rescue operations saving migrants’ lives — or just encouraging them to take greater risks?

On its website, IOM describes AVRR as the “orderly and humane return and reintegration of migrants who are unable or unwilling to remain in host or transit countries and wish to return voluntarily to their countries of origin.” And while many of the detained migrants I spoke with in Libya expressed a desire to go home after months of suffering in decrepit facilities, it’s unclear whether their return could ever be considered voluntary. Treat anyone bad enough and they will beg to make it stop.

Wajdi Almontaser, the director of the Airport Road detention center in Tripoli, was frank about the poor choices facing migrants in centers like his. “They usually want to go home because they had a bad experience in Libya or because the detention is indefinite, so they use the IOM process to get repatriated and then try again to reach Europe,” he told me.

Mistreatment in these detention facilities doesn’t only take the form of beatings and harassment. The militias also buy and sell their detainees or rent them out as day laborers, to the highest bidder, in a process rights groups have likened to the slave trade. Bambo Jaiteh, a 22-year-old from Gambia who was detained in the Il Khalah detention center outside Tripoli, told me that he had previously been detained in a “prison camp,” where they were loaned out to business people and forced to do manual labor such as heavy debris removal, digging at construction sites, and cleaning. “They took you out to work, and we were only sometimes given food,” he said.

Militias also profit by selling arrested African migrants to smugglers, who expect to collect fees from family members before placing them on boats to Italy. But the real prize is access to the hundreds of millions of dollars promised to underwrite the counter-migration machine.

As soon as European leaders recalibrated their entire foreign policy toward Libya — and much of Africa — around the goal of stemming migration, many of the same militias once directly involved in migrant smuggling and human trafficking began to see migrant detention as a promising growth industry. Over the course of dozens of interviews in Libya, militia leaders, government officials, and representatives from local NGOs all used the word “business” — in English, rather than Arabic — to explain why so many militias are adding the arrest and detention of migrants to their portfolio of services.

Militias are now racing to outdo each other in the eyes of their European benefactors. Many of the men, women, and children caught up in the dragnet of Libya’s migration crackdown had no intention of going to Europe in the first place. Some of them were even in the country legally. At the Abu Salim detention center in Tripoli, several migrants from Mali and Niger who were detained after a raid in a predominantly “black African” neighborhood told me that they had valid papers and had come to Libya for work. They may never have intended to go to Europe, but they are now caught up in the detention-and-deportation machine designed to keep others from getting there.

According to Frederic Wehrey, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who specializes in post-conflict transitions, the process unfolding around migration in Libya in many ways mirrors U.S. and European engagement with various Libyan actors to combat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. “In the fight against ISIS, whatever militia was in proximity to an ISIS stronghold would come forward and present themselves as the best option for tackling ISIS,” he said. “These groups catch on very quickly that this is the way the game works,” he continued. “And they use this to outmaneuver their rivals and build up power.”

West African migrants rest in the Abu Salim detention center.

Foreign governments, along with aid and humanitarian organizations, can all claim they are partnering with groups and individuals who are technically registered as part of the government, but these arrangements are a “thin disguise,” according to Wehrey. “Just because someone is under the Ministry of Interior does not mean they are not acting autonomously and running their own show.”

The European Union’s willingness to partner with militias, however thinly disguised as government agents, has created a market for the detention, sale, and abuse of migrants. It also risks accelerating the fragmentation of the state, officials and outside experts warn. “There is one argument that you start local and build up, that maybe this local engagement is how you build things from the bottom up,” Wehrey said. “But my sense is that if you are creating warlords through this type of engagement, that is not a good thing.”

Authorities in Tripoli agree, arguing that a misalignment in priorities between Libya and the European Union risks undermining the larger goal of putting the Libyan state back together. “We have priorities, and they [the EU] have priorities, and each one is looking out for themselves,” said Anwar Sherif, who heads the special operation unit of the Libyan navy, which, like the coast guard, only has a few functioning boats. “They [the EU] say Libya is unstable and then also say Libya refuses to stop illegal migration. This is stupid. The priority should be stability in Libya.”

One afternoon in the port of Tripoli, Sherif and I watched as Libyan authorities, with help from the UNHCR and IOM, processed 400 migrants they had recently intercepted at sea. As the dejected migrants prepared to board buses destined for detention centers, Sherif pointed across the dock to two merchant vessels moored off in the distance, one of them Ukrainian and the other Turkish. The Libyan navy had caught them both the week before, he said, carrying 132 million gallons of stolen fuel between them. It was a rare win for the navy, which had managed to outgun the two ships over the course of a two-hour firefight. Most of the time, Sherif and his colleagues told me, they are unable able to act on the dozens of reports they receive each day about smuggling ships that are thought to be siphoning off the country’s economic lifeline on an industrial scale.

Migrants from Senegal look out into the prison courtyard from their overcrowded jail cell in the Abu Salim detention center.

Given that oil revenues are considered crucial to stabilizing Libya, one would think that preventing fuel theft would be a mutual priority shared by Libya and the international community. Yet, according to Sherif, the only conversations his European counterparts are willing to have with him when it comes to training, funding, and equipment are about migrant smuggling. “We are open to improving ourselves, upgrading our knowledge, and bringing our skills up to international standards, but our job is to protect our nation’s sovereignty, not just focus on migrants in the sea.”

There is another problem as well: Many of the most prominent fuel smugglers along the Libyan coast are officially registered under the Interior Ministry, according to Sherif, and are the same coast guard units with which the EU is now partnering to combat migrant smuggling. Sherif won’t name anyone specifically — but he mentions a certain coast guard official who operates out of the port of Zawiya and was recently in Rome meeting with European officials.

Yet according to navy officials like Sherif and his colleague, spokesman Abyoub Qassem, European powers are unwilling to look too closely at what unsavory partners like Bija are up to so long as they fight migration. “Europe wants to use Libya as its Berlin Wall to divide Africa from Europe,” said Qassem, adding that he objects to high-minded criticism from Europeans about human rights. “Europe wants to keep its human rights trademark and keep its own reputation clean.”

Peter Tinti (@petertinti) is an independent journalist focusing on conflict, security, human rights, and organized crime. He is the author, with Tuesday Reitano, of Migrant, Refugee, Smuggler, Savior.

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Slideshow: My Smuggler, My Savior

They’re migrants’ only chance of making it safely across the Sahara. They’re also outlaws engaged in a deadly game of cat and mouse with Niger’s military.

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The Savior’s Dilemma

Are naval search-and-rescue operations saving migrants’ lives — or just encouraging them to take greater risks?