[Ynet] In a dirt-floored room in the town of Agadez in Niger, a pair of flip-flops and a cold pile of ashes are all that remain of what was once a teeming stopover for Less than a year ago, Agadez was a boomtown - a hub for smuggling networks that profited off
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
, working with Niger's government, bankrolled a crackdown on the trade.
"We have seen the numbers fall dramatically since August," said Marina Schramm, deputy chief of mission at the International Organization for Migration, which monitors migrant flows at two points in the Agadez region.
"Before, we saw several thousand passages per week. Now we're close to zero ... several dozen," she said, noting that numbers normally fall in the winter, but not by so much.
| I seem to recall that the west coast of Africa has some extensive experience, going back several centuries, in the collection and packaging of people for shipment to another continent... |