People smuggling is a big business around the world, with smugglers and human traffickers making millions of dollars per year in what the International Labour Organization (ILO) says is generating as much as $150 billion per year in ill-gotten profits through forced labour or prostitution.
This week, the International police agency Interpol announced a major operation against human trafficking that had taken place in partnership with several African countries and the African policing agency Afripol.
Over the span of two months, May and June, operation “FLASH-WEKA” was able to secure the arrests of 1,062 suspected people smugglers and human traffickers, according to a press release from Interpol released on July 25th.
Interpol Secretary General Jürgen Stock commented on the operation saying,
Human trafficking and migrant smuggling are often part of a wider and more complex criminal chain. This is why close cooperation between Interpol and Afripol is so important in uniting our resources to dismantle these networks and ultimately identify and rescue thousands of unsuspecting victims.
“The leads generated by Operation FLASH-WEKA will no doubt result in further arrests, bringing to justice those who traffic in human misery,” he said.
Along with the over 1,000 arrests of people traffickers and smugglers, 823 trafficking victims were identified, 2,731 illegal migrants were found, and 801 criminal items were seized, including firearms and other items.
While the operation was funded by agencies in Germany, the United States, Norway, and the European Union, much of the actual operation took place in Africa, where investigators found widespread human trafficking, including victims of sex trafficking from Nigeria.
Nigerian mafia groups also operate heavily in Europe, with groups like the notorious Black Axe behind drug networks and forced prostitution in several countries including Italy and Sweden.
In Italy, reports from 2019 claimed that Nigerian gangs were sex trafficking children as young as twelve and forcing them into prostitution.
Italian authorities were able to intercept phone conversations between a “Maman,” often an older woman who may have also been a former prostitute, and others that revealed the gangs found it easier to use illegal immigration to bring in new girls to force into sexual slavery.
Interpol also noted that victims of trafficking were not limited to Africans but also found seven Vietnamese women who had been sex trafficked to Angola where they were forced into sexual slavery. In addition, Interpol arrested nine people in Iraq accused of organ trafficking.
Many of the traffickers and smugglers who operate in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia overlap with those smuggling migrants into Europe and while some simply facilitate illegal crossings, many other groups have more sinister motives.
In 2019, Italy uncovered a network that not only facilitated illegal immigration but did so on behalf of radical Islamic terrorist groups looking to smuggle their fighters into Europe undetected in order to potentially carry out acts of terror.
While the arrests will likely be a blow to some people trafficking and human smuggling, smugglers overall have been doing large amounts of business this year, with the Central Mediterranean migrant route seeing a huge surge in numbers so far.
According to the European Union border agency Frontex, in the first six months of 2023, over 65,000 migrants made the dangerous voyage across the Mediterranean Sea by boat, an increase of 137% compared to the same period last year.
The agency noted that illegal arrivals are at their highest level since the migrant crisis in 2016, showing that despite the crackdowns by authorities like Interpol and Afripol, the smuggling and trafficking business is booming.
