Merchants Of Men

A powerful and sophisticated underground business delivers thousands of refugees a day all along the Mediterranean coasts of Europe. The new breed of criminals that controls it has risen out of the political chaos of post-9/11 Western foreign policy and the fiasco of the Arab Spring. These merchants of men are intertwined with jihadist armed organizations such as al Qaeda in the Maghreb. They have prospered smuggling cocaine from West Africa and kidnapping Westerners. More recently, the destabilization of Syria and Iraq coupled with the rise of ISIS offered them new business opportunities in the Middle East, from selling Western hostages to jihadist groups to trafficking in refugees numbering in the millions. Overall, the kidnapping industry today is bigger than the illegal drug trade and worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Merchants of Men is based on exclusive access to hostage negotiators actively involved in ransom negotiations and rescue missions, counter-terrorism experts, members of security services, and former hostages, among many others. The reader will discover that the protocols of prevention and rescue change according to the type of abduction and the designated targets, and will come to know first hand the range of experiences of kidnapping victims. Will the West once again reap the benefits of the political chaos it has sown in its own backyard? From colonization to the advent of "friendly" dictatorial regimes, today's fast-aging European nations are buyers on the refugee market. New workers are needed, and the merchants of men are supplying them. But only skilled, highly educated refugees are wanted. As a tsunami of migrants and refugees floods Europe, new questions almost too numerous to count must be answered.

The compelling and highly-informed account of one of the world's darkest and most lucrative new businesses - human trafficking. Every day, a powerful and sophisticated underground business delivers thousands of refugees along the Mediterranean coasts of Europe. A new breed of criminals, risen from the political chaos of post-9/11 Western foreign policy and the fiasco of the Arab Spring, controls it. In the early 2000s these merchants of men prospered by smuggling cocaine from West Africa and kidnapping westerners to sell to jihadist organisations like al-Qaeda in the Maghreb. More recently, the destabilisation of Syria and Iraq coupled with the rise of ISIS offered them new business opportunities in the Middle East, from selling western hostages to trafficking millions of refugees...Overall in these regions, the kidnapping and trafficking industries are bigger than the illegal drug trade and are worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Merchants of Men is based on exclusive access to those involved in kidnapping and trafficking - hostage negotiators, counterterrorism experts, members of the security services, former hostages, traffickers and refugees. In a gripping narrative it will describe the brutal processes of kidnapping and human trafficking from a personal and global level, and the shocking economic interdependency of their business models...