Taliban fighters, coordinated by the Afghan government and intelligence service, are exploiting the frequent infighting between human trafficking gangs and have taken control of most of their operations just outside the EU’s southern border with Serbia, a recent Hungarian intelligence report concluded.
The sensitive report, originally dated October 25th, was first leaked to the Hungarian daily Magyar Nemzet, and then declassified on October 31st and published on the government’s website last week.
The document explains that shootouts between trafficking gangs, using assault weapons, have become “almost a daily occurrence” in the past couple of years as the gangs compete for bigger ‘market’ shares and larger segments of the border, recently going as far as shooting at Serbian police officers and Hungarian border guards too. The predominantly Hungarian local population of the border area is terrified of the nightly clashes, but at least the Serbian police appear to be finally beginning to address the full scale of the situation, as over 4,500 arrests were made during recent raids prompted by yet another deadly shooting last week.
Now, these groups are about to become even more organized and well-equipped. According to the declassified report, “The Taliban secret service took direct control over the operations of the human smuggler groups of Afghan origin within Vojvodina”—Serbia’s northernmost region—by exploiting the increasingly violent competition already happening on the ground, and placed them under the command of the Haqqani network, one of the Taliban’s most militant factions.
The document details that since the majority of migrant trafficking gangs in Vojvodina were already led by Afghanis, it was relatively easy for the Taliban to infiltrate and take control of them. Utilizing the Taliban’s vast cross-border connections, Tajik passports are readily available for Afghan fighters who then can travel to Serbia—via Moscow—without even a visa requirement.
“The smuggling business is becoming more and more lucrative every year, as evidenced by the constant rise in the number of illegal immigrants caught, as well as the periodic market redistribution battles and radicalization of rival criminal gangs,” the report says, adding that the average border crossing price is also steadily increasing, reaching as high as €1000 per person, and there are 1000-1200 illegal crossing attempts each night.
By ending the internal conflicts and taking control of the finances of these groups, the report suggests, the goal of the Taliban-run Afghan government is to “use the enormous income coming from human trafficking as its own revenue, even to finance terrorism.” Furthermore, centralized finances make it easier to bribe authorities and purchase weapons locally, it adds.
Taliban’s involvement in the human smuggling business “does not surprise anyone in Serbia,” Andrej Mitic, the International Secretary of the Serbian Movement Dveri party told The European Conservative. “In the north of Serbia, near the Hungarian border, we have practically a de facto ‘state’ of immigrant bandits that nobody controls, except their criminal bosses. … The situation is very serious—murders, rapes, and clashes between bands of migrants in the north of Serbia became a regular thing,” he said, calling for immediate immigration reform.
The overwhelming Taliban control of human trafficking in the Balkans not only poses an increased security threat in terms of better organizational structure and equipment but also from an ideological point of view. The document details recent TikTok videos published by one of the major Taliban-controlled groups in the area, which do not serve as recruitment ads for migrants but are only intended as glorification of violence using ISIS-style imagery.
In this context, the emergence of a group whose members are openly violent and unscrupulous, and whose ‘home-grown’ attitude of glory in attacking and defeating the ‘enemy soldier,’ is a major risk factor.
However, some still doubt whether the evidence points to actual Taliban control or just a series of well-done PR stunts. “Some emerging groups are adopting the names and symbols of renowned Taliban units more as a strategy to attract potential clients using powerful symbols familiar to Afghans, rather than actual affiliation with these units,” Srboljub Peovic, a research assistant at the Institute of European Studies told The European Conservative.
But whether Kabul is directly in the background or not does not change the fact that these groups certainly present themselves as if the Taliban were involved, which attracts the attention of others. This means that despite the increasing centralization of these rings, the constant in-fighting for resources will probably end here. The intelligence report warns that several other Middle Eastern terrorist organizations are following the Taliban’s successful model and are considering joining the competition with their own gangs, which would significantly scale up the problem throughout the region.
Hungary and Serbia could address these challenges with the use of force—the report ends: “but it would presumably lead to an organized, violent response from the criminal gangs too … putting the lives of both professional personnel and migrants at risk on a daily basis.”
