In this concluding part, The Independent’s Kevin Sieff reports from Agadez, a city where desperate souls begin their trek to Europe…
The Niger government has made sporadic attempts to shut down the smugglers. After the bodies of 92 migrants were found in the desert outside Agadez in 2013, officers raided a number of the city’s stash houses, arresting owners.
Musa was caught smuggling migrants and spent one month in jail. He resumed his business nearly immediately after being released, shifting his route to more remote stretches of desert. Earlier this year, Niger’s government passed a law that would allow judges to sentence smugglers to prison for up to 30 years, but experts say it hasn’t yet been enforced.
“If you pay the police, it’s no problem getting to Libya, even a truck full of migrants without papers,” said Maliki Amadou Hamadane, head of the Agadez office for the International Organisation for Migration.
While the images of boats capsized in the Mediterranean have come to symbolise the dangers of illegal migration to Europe, the trip through the Sahara is no less risky. Last month, the bodies of 48 migrants were found in two locations a few hundred miles outside Agadez. Musa shrugs off the risks of the journeys. “If God writes that you will die in the desert, then that is how you will die,” he said.
On this Monday afternoon, when the migrants staying with Musa went to purchase water containers for the three-day journey, most returned with a gallon jug. It was all they could afford. They took turns filling them from a spigot.
Konissa carried a jug and a small loaf of bread. He had raced through the market to buy them. “I am scared to be caught,” he said. Musa didn’t ask questions when the migrants arrived. When the 11-year-old girl from Burkina Faso named Saly showed up, wearing a long skirt with red birds on it, he looked at her but said nothing.
He knew, like other smugglers in Agadez, that not everyone he transported was choosing to make the journey. But he saw himself as a man providing a service. “They call me and ask for a trip to Libya, and I do it for them,” he said. “I don’t force them to travel anywhere.”
Just two days before Musa’s truck departed, an estate car full of 12 Nigerian girls had entered Agadez, driven by a short, bald man named Jagondi, who even Musa described as a “big smuggler”.
The girls had been sold by their parents into a trafficking network, Jagondi said. It was not an unusual event. He had been driving girls, mostly from Nigeria, to Libya for years, taking extra care to hide his passengers. “They will become prostitutes in Europe,” he said, claiming that he was not involved in that part of the business.
After dropping the girls at a stash house, Jagondi parked his vehicle in front of his own house, next to a large mosque. He sat outside and ate a bowl of rice and porridge. He recalled how, one night, he was driving around Agadez when he spotted a 14-year-old girl whom he had shuttled there. He remembered her fondly; she had called him “Daddy”. But that night, she was standing in a poorly lit back alley, working as a prostitute.
She saw him in his car and screamed, “Daddy, Daddy,” he recounted. He kept driving. “I was very, very sad,” he said.
For his part, Musa appeared less concerned about his human cargo. After he walked away from 11-year-old Saly, her uncle, who had accompanied her on the 1,000-mile journey from Burkina Faso, explained that she had been sent by her parents to make money in Libya. “She will wash clothes or do other work in the house,” said the uncle. “Back home, some women said, ‘Don’t bring the girl’, but she wants to have a job to help her parents.”
When she was asked why she was leaving home, Saly stared ahead and said nothing.
“Where is the little girl?” asked Musa’s brother Abdul Karim, standing next to the truck on Monday night. Saly was sitting on a backpack on the ground. Three men lifted her on to the bed of the pickup, seven feet above the ground.
Then, one by one, the men climbed aboard. Musa and his brothers had stuck tree limbs between the bags and supplies so that the men sitting on the edge of the vehicle could hold on, their legs hanging just above the ground.
“Do we need money to pay the police?” one migrant asked. “Whatever I give you, they will take,” said a short, thin man named Mohammed, who works for Musa. “We will pay for everyone together.”
“Will there be bandits on the way?” asked another. “You will be fine,” said Mohammed. “Musa is a professional. He never loses the road.”
Konissa’s uncle was living somewhere in Italy. The plan was to call him once the truck arrived in the Libyan city of Sabha, the next staging ground for migrants. Konissa already had the phone number of a smuggler there.
When the truck was full, two of Musa’s employees opened the metal gates that separated the stash house from a main road. The truck shot on to the street and past a mosque where women were praying outside. “Libya!” one woman cheered.
The vehicle flew by the last mud-baked houses of Agadez and within minutes it was in the desert, in near total darkness.
The next morning, the police in Agadez announced that they had arrested about a dozen smugglers and 40 migrants.
Back at Musa’s store, his employees scanned photos of the detained. Neither Musa nor his brother was among them. Behind the counter, another of his brothers, Abdul Salam, laughed. “Even when he was young, we called Musa ‘The Warrior’,” he said. “He wasn’t scared of anyone.”
Then Abdul Salam went back to work. There was always more work: the next migrants were to arrive soon.
