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

183 Pages·2016·2.26 MB·English

by  Loretta Napoleoni

Copyright © 2016 by Loretta Napoleoni A SEVEN STORIES PRESS FIRST EDITION
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In memory of Luigi Bernabò
contents
preface
prologue
Part 1
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb Protocol
Feeding the Bears
Trafficking Migrants
The Economics of Piracy
The Somali Diaspora’s Gulf Connection
Smoke and Mirrors of the Syrian Civil War
Part 2
The Negotiator1
The Ransom
The Golden Hour—Anatomy of a Kidnapping
The Prey—Seeking a New Identity
The Mythology of Western Hostages
Part 3
The End of Truth
Playing Chess with the Hostages’ Lives
A Refugee Love Story
The Political Boomerang
Brexit
glossary
acknowledgments
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 Africa—from where cargoes of slaves had sailed to America—
and 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 club—I will call them Westerners even though they may be from Tokyo or
Santiago as easily as from New York or Copenhagen—to 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 Marzullo—two young Italians
kidnapped in Syria in 2014 and sold to al Nusra—cost 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