Smuggler Gangs’ Gunfights For Business in Migrant Camps on English Channel: Report

A group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent. Picture date: Monday August 14, 2023. (Photo by Gareth Fuller/PA Images via Getty Images)
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Oliver JJ Lane

Smuggler gangs competing for the lucrative business of trafficking humans across the English Channel into soft-touch Britain are shooting it out between themselves just miles from the UK border, eye-witnesses state.

Gunshots rang out across the notorious Grande-Synthe migrant camp on Saturday morning just hours before overloaded boats put to sea in bad weather in an effort to force entry in the United Kingdom which, tragically, led to at least six deaths. According to a report in UK newspaper of record The Times, which says it has spoken to migrants who were in the camp, and said they were woken by gunfire that morning.

A 15-year-old from Afghanistan told the paper that there was shooting and screaming, and that he believed the shooting to be over a dispute between Kurdish and Afghan smuggling gangs. An Iraqi appeared to confirm the story, telling the newspaper that such turf wars in the camps “happens all the time” and that he thought “I think they just fire their guns in the air mainly to frighten each other. This place is full of bad people.”

The report underlines the situation proliferating across Europe, that where there are weak borders and insufficient law enforcement there are smuggling gangs, and where there are smuggling gangs there is violence. As previously reported, gun battles between different ethnically-based smuggler gangs have reached a more developed state in Serbia where Afghan and Pakistani human traffickers exchange fire nightly to win control of territory and business.

Far from simply shooting into the air, major pitched battles have been reported, with injuries and fatalities. Unfortunately for those who pay considerable amounts of money to the gangs to be smuggled into Europe and Britain, this violence is rarely confined to the smugglers and Europe’s courts have had years of cases of traffickers sent down for beating, killing, and raping those who paid them for clandestine travel. In some cases, people smugglers pimp out underage migrant girls in ‘exchange’ for their passage.

The ramping violence may be explained by the large sums of money involved, as callous trafficking gangs capitalise upon Europe’s aversion to border control. Smuggling people into Europe is an industry worth billions of dollars every year, and particularly where sea crossings are involved, cornsers cut means a greater profit margin.

This is bad news for the migrants themselves, tempted to Europe by the promise of a better life and lax border controls, who are crowded into unseaworthy craft at thousands of dollars per head. This is a system that seems to be intensifying in the English Channel — the site of a deadly tragedy this past week — where government figures show more migrants are crammed per boat now than ever before.

As reported, there were an average of 52 people per migrant boat trying to force entry to the United Kingdom in July.

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