The Desert Town That’s Home to U.S. Drones and People Smugglers

(Bloomberg) -- Moctar raised his right hand above his head and from an almost impossible height poured hot tea into a glass as he recounted his latest trip to Libya transporting migrants seeking to make the hazardous Mediterranean crossing to Europe.

The 72-hour journey across the border from Niger to Libya was perilous, with the list of potential dangers including attacks by bandits and Islamist militants to the more mundane of crashing into sand dunes or simply running out of gas. Luckily he reached his destination.

He then stuffed his Toyota Hilux with pasta, canned tomatoes, sugar, flour and cooking oil for sale back home. It was one of dozens of such excursions Moctar, 30, has made over the years from Agadez, a sprawling cluster of low, sand-colored compounds huddling in the desert of northern Niger. Now it’s also the front line of both Europe’s anti-migration efforts and the fight by U.S., French and African forces against the spread of Islamist militancy.
 

Increasingly, Moctar, who is not being identified in full because of the nature of his work, and other smugglers are finding times tough because of the crackdown on trafficking by the Nigerien authorities in cooperation with European nations. Sometimes he turns to smuggling the opioid tramadol, which is popular in neighboring Nigeria.

“The trafficking of migrants continues, the only difference is now sometimes I fill up the car with drugs, mostly tramadol, when I can’t find enough migrants,” he said. “If you’re taking the risk of breaking the law, there’s no point holding back. You might as well go big, at least that’ll make it worth the risk.”

Agadez’s role as a hub for trans-Saharan trade dates back centuries — from salt caravans in the 15th century to illicit convoys of migrants.

“People here live off migrants, it’s how we feed our families,” said 38-year-old Andre, who’s been driving migrants from Agadez, a city of about 100,000 people, to southern Libya since 2007, but these days struggles to find work. “The authorities treat us like criminals when we are just trying to do our job. I know at least two dozen people who have become bandits for lack of work.”

Today Agadez is playing a new role in the region as home to Air Base 201, where American forces target insurgents affiliated to al-Qaeda and Islamic State in cooperation with the French military throughout the Sahel, an arid area on the southern fringe of the Sahara. The expanded U.S. profile in the region was highlighted in 2017 when four American soldiers died in an ambush in Niger.

“With Mali and Burkina Faso having lost control of large swaths of territory and the presence of the jihadists’ bases, the risk is that they link battlefields across the Sahel,” said Frank Van der Mueren, head of the European Union’s civilian capacity-building mission in Niger, known as EUCAP Sahel Niger. 

Niger is now seen by the Europeans as a strategic partner and a “lock on the door’’ for security in the Sahel, he said. 

The Nigerien authorities passed a law in 2015 that made trafficking in migrants a criminal offense and reinforced border patrols. A quarter of the 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) in aid the EU has provided Niger over the 2017-20 period has gone to policies to curb migration. 

The Nigerien measure followed an agreement between African and European leaders to a common approach to address the root causes of migration amid a surge of arrivals by sea and on land at the EU’s external borders, with more than 1 million asylum seekers and migrants trying to reach EU member states that year. 

In 2018, the EU border control authority Frontex opened its first Risk Analysis Cell on the continent in Niger’s capital, Niamey, about 950 kilometers (590 miles) southwest of Agadez.

The efforts appear to be working. In 2018, illegal crossings on the Niger route plunged by 80% to 23,000, the lowest number since 2012, according to Frontex.

At the same time, migration has now picked up along a western route through Morocco, and prompted smugglers to forge new, more dangerous routes through its eastern neighbor Chad, the European Council on Foreign Relations said in an October 2019 policy brief.

And some of Niger’s tougher measures on migration have fueled concerns that they’re worsening security.

“The largely military approach has pushed the traffic underground and reinforced criminal networks, including the militias in Libya and some terrorist groups,” said Mohamed Anacko, the president of Agadez’s regional council.

Competition over drug trafficking routes between ethnic militias in the tri-border area between Niger, Chad and Libya further risks destabilizing northern Niger.

“The situation in Libya boosts the development of transnational border crime and the circulation of arms that reinforces the armed actors and feeds into the conflicts across the Sahel,” said Niger’s interior minister, Mohamed Bazoum. “The conflict in Libya is fuel on the fire.”

The exploration of new gold deposits and oil with the construction of a $5 billion oil pipeline by the China National Petroleum Corp., from the Agadem fields in northeastern Niger, brings its own risks. Small-scale gold mining is an increasingly important source of revenue for jihadists operating in the Sahel, including Niger.

In northern Niger, most people live off farming, construction work, seasonal migration to Libya and the migrants who still pass though. At one point, young men left to fight with the rebels in Libya, until the spread of Islamic State made the situation there too dangerous.

Until 2015, migration-related activities contributed as much as $100 million per year to the regional economy around Agadez, according to the International Crisis Group, citing local authorities in a recent report. At one point, the industry was estimated to support more than half of the households in the town.

Authorities managed local conflicts by turning a blind eye to former ethnic Tuareg rebels-turned-smugglers running unofficial travel agencies and moving people, gold, drugs and pasta across the desert. Travel agents made as much as $5,000 a week, employing drivers, cooks, guards and coaxers who picked up migrants from bus stops and brought them to so-called ghettos, or migrant housing, in town.

Today, they’ve seen their revenue dwindles.

Dealing with illegal migration by banning the movement of contraband goods and people could be counter-productive, said William Assanvo, an analyst with the Institute for Security Studies in Dakar, Senegal.

“In some areas, contraband and illicit activities is simply the way in which people are making an income and how the economy is structured,“ Assanvo said.

The U.S. drone base hasn’t been much help, either. For a few months in 2017, Agadez residents were bused to the base to help elongate the airstrip for the armed drones that started taking off last year. When that was done, the offers of work quickly dried up.

“First, the tourists stopped coming,” said Surajh Rabiou, a craftsman selling jewelry and wooden carvings near the town’s mosque. “Then Europe decided to shut down migration, so we lost that income too. Now the American troops are here, but they don’t buy my jewelry like the tourists used to do.”

--With assistance from Pauline Bax and Jeremy Diamond.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Karl Maier at kmaier2@bloomberg.net, Paul Richardson

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.