IN BASMANE, a gritty neighbourhood in the heart of the Turkish port city of Izmir, a plump, smartly-dressed young man named Uday flips through videos on his expensive smartphone. In one of them, recorded last summer, a rubber boat heaving with passengers motors toward Greece. On shore a visibly slimmer Uday, then an apprentice smuggler, waves to the migrants on board. Uday explains that he used the videos to convince refugees to choose him and his gang over the competition. “It was to show people the journey was safe,” he says.
Uday, who studied law in his native Syria before escaping to Turkey in 2013, has no qualms about his work as a trafficker. He says he earned about $100,000 in less than a year. “None of my boats capsized. We were helping those people,” he brags. But today, Uday is out of a job. Turkish police have made the migrant trade risky and unprofitable: “These days, you lose more money than you make.”
For much of last year, Turkey looked the other way as an estimated 850,000 migrants crossed by sea into Greece. In November it agreed to stem the refugee tide in exchange for an offer of €3...Continue reading
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