How did the road of international crime in the Sahara desert come into being?

The Sahara Desert occupies a very high position in China's literary mind, because there is a sad love story of "San Mao and Jose". In recent years, tourism in North Africa near the Sahara Desert is also extremely popular, especially in Casablanca, Morocco.

But what Wen Qing people may not know is that there is great danger near Casablanca in North Africa. In the Sahara desert, there are several desert roads running through the Sahel and its surrounding areas, which are several international criminal roads covering smuggling, drug trafficking, hostage-taking, human trafficking and illegal immigration.

▲ Night view of Casablanca

Where is such a dangerous Sahel? It is located between the Sahara Desert in northern Africa and the grassland area in central Sudan, starting from Senegal, which connects the Atlantic Ocean in northwest Africa, passing through Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan and Eritrea, and extending to eastern Africa.

▲ Al Qaeda activity areas in the Sahel and Maghreb.

What are the dangers in the Sahel and its surrounding areas? How did the road of international crime in the Sahara desert come into being?

Before the "9 1 1" incident, the Sahara and the surrounding areas of the Sahel were not the activities of drug lords. The United States is his base camp, from drug manufacturing and trafficking to money laundering, Central America to the United States can be carried out in one stop. However, the sudden "9 1 1" incident changed the drug lords' plans.

The "9 1 1" incident was a terrorist attack, which seems to have little to do with drug trafficking? Why can drug lords make such a big noise and still fight in the main battlefield?

The reason is the problem of drug money turning black into white. Before "9 1 1", most of the drug proceeds in the world were laundered in dollars. However, after "9 1 1", the US government began to strengthen the monitoring of citizens' private information, and President George W. Bush signed the American Patriot Act, which not only strengthened the monitoring of individuals, but also directly interrupted drug traffickers' illegal income laundering activities through dollars.

After the implementation of strict monitoring, due to the huge amount of drug money, the dollars earned by drug lords with drugs are not only difficult to clean, but also very easy to alarm the financial regulatory authorities in the United States, which has caused a huge blow to their business.

When the road to money laundering in the United States is broken, we must find other ways. Europe has become a new fertile ground for drug dealers to trade drugs and launder money. Europe has a unified currency, and there is no private information monitoring system like the United States, so that drug lords can quickly turn Italian drug proceeds into real estate investment income in Paris.

For drug lords, the trick of hiding drugs with human flesh cannot enter their eyes, and their goods often need to be transported in containers. Transporting drugs from Central America to Europe requires crossing the Atlantic Ocean, but the route of transporting drugs directly from Colombia and other drug-making bases to Europe is too dangerous and uncontrollable. Drug lords need a buffer zone, and the Sahara desert in West Africa is his dream buffer zone.

From Guinea Bissau on the west coast of Africa to the north shore of Libya, it is a desert road from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea and from the Sahara to the Sahel.

Affected by the harsh natural environment, backward economic development and political turmoil in countries along the route, before the arrival of drug lords, this desert road was controlled by local strongmen in the Sahel and extremist organizations such as Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, and became a smuggling road full of drugs, weapons and other items.

▲ Drug flow routes in the North Atlantic region

It is the best choice for drug lords to turn such a ready-made smuggling road into a buffer zone for transporting drugs from South America to Europe. Through cooperation and sharing with local strongmen such as Al-Qaida in the Maghreb, they transported heroin from Colombia and other places in Africa to Guinea-Bissau, then to the northern coast of Libya through base camps such as Mali and Algeria, and finally to Europe through the Mediterranean.

According to a statistic in previous years, 50-60 tons of drugs are transported to Europe through the Sahara desert every year, accounting for 13% of the European drug trade. With the joint efforts of drug lords and Al Qaeda, this desert road from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean has changed from smuggling to drug trafficking.

For Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, everything from medicine and oil to weapons or drugs will be smuggled and sold on these desert roads in the Sahel and surrounding areas as long as it is profitable. Gradually, they found that there was an "item" that made more money than selling drugs: hostages!

▲ Al Qaeda in the Maghreb

Unlike collecting tolls for drug smuggling, kidnapping hostages for ransom is Al Qaeda's own "business". If drug dealers eat meat, Maghreb organizations drink soup to help drug dealers, and selling hostages means eating alone.

For Maghreb organizations, foreign hostages, especially those in Europe, are their main targets. There are generally two kinds of foreigners coming to the Sahara desert, one is tourists, and the other is people who come to Africa for humanitarian assistance.

In 2009, Spanish tourist Gomez came to the Sahara desert alone. Like most tourists who come to northwest Africa, she is just going to Western Sahara and Morocco for a holiday. Out of longing for the desert, she added a two-day trip to Algeria. Unexpectedly, this trip to the desert brought her great hardships.

Gomez was kidnapped by Al-Qaida in the Maghreb on his way to Algeria, accompanied by his personal tour guide and driver. However, the kidnappers were obviously not interested in the local drivers and tour guides, and abandoned them halfway, leaving only Ms. Gomez. The kidnapper's destination is a concentration camp in northern Mali.

Like the drug trafficking and smuggling mentioned above, Al-Qaida in the Maghreb is also very familiar with the road of hostage kidnapping from Algeria to Mali concentration camp. On the road with Ms. Gomez in the past few days, they know exactly where to stand and where to refuel. Because their "business" began in 2003, when Al Qaeda kidnapped 32 Europeans.

The purpose of kidnapping foreigners is to negotiate with the country where the hostages are located and demand ransom. Negotiations are a game process, and both Al Qaeda and the governments of the countries where the hostages are located are very worried.

The government is in a dilemma: if it doesn't pay the ransom, it will be under pressure from the families of the hostages, and at the same time it will be labeled as a national life and death; If a ransom is paid at one time, it is equivalent to supporting Al Qaeda's terrorist activities; If forced to rescue, there is a risk of being torn by kidnappers.

For kidnappers, the cost of holding hostages is also very high, and they want to cash the hostages as soon as possible to avoid sleeping.

Fortunately, the tourist Gomez was finally rescued by the motherland and returned to his home in Spain. But not every hostage is as lucky as Gomez. Many people died in the Sahara desert and Al Qaeda concentration camps.

The prevalence of drug trafficking and smuggling trade, coupled with the expanding sphere of influence of Al Qaeda, has seriously threatened the security and peace in northwest Africa and the Sahel region. Coupled with bad weather and natural disasters, there has been an increasingly serious famine and food security crisis in this area.

If you don't have enough to eat, your life is not guaranteed. To survive, everyone must go out. Illegal immigration is the only way for these people to escape from here, and Europe has become their ideal paradise.

▲ African illegal immigrants go to the sea (the front row wearing masks may be snakeheads)

/kloc-Ternaud, a Guinean refugee aged 0/8, has such a European dream. He learned about the cost and route of illegal immigration to Europe from traffickers and tried his best to get to Europe.

In fact, the route of illegal immigrants is the same as that of smuggling and drug trafficking. People from all over the world who want to immigrate illegally are sent to Mali for transit, then reach the northern coast of Libya and finally sneak into Italy.

Criminal gangs don't need to open a special passage for stowaways, because they know this desert crime road from Mali to Libya as well as smuggling goods and drug trafficking. Trucks bound for Libya by stowaways such as Ternaud may have taken heroin or guns in the last wave.

In the past few decades, a large number of African refugees like Ternaud have sneaked into Europe every day, and human smuggling has become the most profitable business in the Sahara desert in northwest Africa.

So, can a large number of West African refugees who have crossed the desert to Libya really go to Europe?

The answer is no, in fact, most refugees can't go to Europe, but are packed in containers and circled around Libya like goods.

European countries, especially Italy, which faces Libya across the sea, have clearly realized the importance of Libya in the issue of illegal immigration in Africa. In order to support Libya in forcing African refugees to immigrate to Europe illegally, Italy began to allocate funds to Libya in 2005, and Libya tacitly tried to stop the refugees before they went to Europe.

Most of these refugees with European dreams are 100 people locked in a container, and they are often captured by the police just after leaving the Libyan coast. They were forced to board the truck again and cross the Sahara desert again to reach the new concentration camp.

Refugees released from concentration camps immediately became the goods of traffickers, who sold them again and again in the process of being transported by neighboring areas in Libya.

When West African refugees like Ternaud boarded the truck to Libya, they might only think of the beautiful scenery of Europe, but they didn't expect that this road, which used to be the road of illegal immigration, had already become the road of human trafficking, and very few people could reach Europe.

▲ African illegal immigrants walked through the desert.

In the Sahel and its surrounding areas, a series of transnational criminal activities such as smuggling, drug trafficking, hostage-taking, human trafficking and illegal immigration have formed their own systems and spheres of influence here. Some organizations even turned their illegally acquired wealth into local political and military forces, which seriously affected peace and stability in this region.

Why does this area become a crime gathering place for international criminals?

The Sahara and Sahel regions are one of the poorest regions in the world. The biggest feature of these criminal activities, such as drug trafficking, smuggling and hostage-taking, is to make money quickly. It is not surprising that so many people are willing to take risks when the poorest countries meet the fastest "business".

▲ The life of ordinary people in the Sahel and surrounding areas

Ordinary people want to make quick money through crooked ways. Where are the officials? Governments in the Sahel region are generally weak in management, and officials even collude with Al Qaeda to participate in various crimes and reap huge profits.

In Mauritania, officials colluded with Al Qaeda, and there were many incidents of smuggling weapons and even selling drugs. In 2007, even the nephew of former President Maia Ould was arrested for his involvement in the drug trade.

People are poor, social order is chaotic, the government is busy with civil war and political struggle, and the Sahel region has gradually become a paradise for terrorist activities. Here, terrorism and national separatism are intertwined and used each other, and various extremist organizations are developing rapidly here. They gathered in the border areas of Mauritania, Algeria and Mali, and formed an international criminal gang of terrorism in this desolate desert.

▲ San Mao and Jose

San Mao once said, "Every time I miss you, a grain of sand falls from the sky, and the Sahara has been formed since then." The Sahara desert in the book is far away from us, so far that it is difficult for us to get close to it and understand it. Even in many people's minds, Sahara has only love stories.

However, approaching the Sahara, poverty, war, extremism, international criminal gangs, all kinds of violence and evil are everywhere. This is the Sahara, and this is the real Sahel.

I hope that one day, when the road of crime in the desert is no longer there, there will be love and peace in the beautiful Sahara desert.