An armed group is stopping refugee boats from setting off across the Mediterranean from a city west of Tripoli that has been a springboard for people smugglers, causing a sudden drop in departures over the past month, sources in the area said.
The revelation throws new light on the sharp reduction in refugee arrivals from Italy, which took over from the Aegean route as the main focus of European concerns in the crisis.
Arrivals in Italy from North Africa, the main route for migration to Europe this year, dropped by more than 50 percent last month from a year earlier, and arrivals so far this month are down even further. July and August are peak months for refugee boats because of favorable sea conditions.
Sources in Sabratha, 70km west of the capital, said the sudden drop had been caused by a new force in the seaside city, which is preventing refugees from leaving, often by locking them up.
The group in Sabratha “works on the ground, the beach, to prevent the refugees leaving on boats towards Italy,” said a civil society organizer from the city, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The group is made up of several hundred “civilians, policemen, army figures,” he said.
It is conducting a “very strong campaign” that was launched by a “former mafia boss,” said a second Sabratha source who follows smuggling activity closely.
A third source with contacts in Libya, who also asked not to be named, said the Sabratha group was making “a significant effort to police the area.”
The two Sabratha sources said the group was running a detention center for refugees who are turned back or taken from smugglers. One sent a photograph of hundreds of refugees sitting in the sand in front of a high wall.
One of the sources said he thought the group was seeking legitimacy and financial support from Tripoli, where European states have tried to partner with a UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) to stem refugee flows.
An official from the Libyan Ministry of the Interior’s Department for Combating Illegal Migration in Sabratha did not respond to a request for comment, while it was not possible to contact the group, which the third source said was called Brigade 48, although other sources did not confirm this.
Italy has been trying to bolster the GNA’s ability to stop people smuggling with cash, training and by sending a ship to help repair Tripoli’s coast guard and navy vessels.
About 600,000 refugees have reached Italy by sea from North Africa since 2014, testing the nation’s ability to cope. More than 12,000 have died trying.
Most leave from Libya’s western coast. Following a local backlash against smugglers in Zuwara in the west in 2015, Sabratha became the most frequently used departure point.
Italy wants to replicate a deal with Libya that the EU struck with Turkey last year, largely shutting down the refugee route through Greece and the Balkans.
With a national election looming during the first half of next year, the government in Rome is under pressure to show it can stop, or at least slow, migration.
Last week Italy seized on the drop in arrivals, with Italian Minister of the Interior Marco Minniti saying he saw a “light at the end of the tunnel.”
Refugees rescued last week in the Mediterranean confirmed that conditions had changed in Sabratha, according to an International Organization for Migration (IMO) spokesman, which interviewed refugees who arrived in Trapani, Sicily, on Saturday last week.
“They said that it was very difficult to depart from Sabratha. There are people stopping the boats before they set out and if they get out to sea they’re immediately sent back,” IOM spokesman Flavio Di Giacomo said in Rome.
Some refugees were also turned back before reaching Sabratha, he said.
The EU’s European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, last week said “clashes in Sabratha” contributed to last month’s decline, also citing changeable weather and increased Libyan coast guard presence.
The Sabratha sources were not aware of any clashes.
Another shift in recent weeks has been a clampdown on smuggling of Bangladeshi and North African refugees through Tripoli’s Mitiga International Airport, after a militia that controlled the trade was forced out by a GNA-aligned armed group at the start of last month, Libyan and European officials said.
However, that might take time to take effect. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are already in Libya. In Sabratha, the changes may not stick.
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