ZAWIYAH, Libya -- Libya, the biggest jumping-off point for migrants trying to reach Europe, is now home to a thriving trade in humans.
Unable to pay exorbitant smuggling fees or swindled by traffickers, some of the world's most desperate people are being held as slaves, tortured or forced into prostitution.
Their deteriorating plight raises questions about European Union agreements to stem the flow of migrants. Under these deals, Libya was promised more than $225 million to enforce stricter border controls and maintain migrant assistance centers that respect "international humanitarian standards." Last month, Libya's Western-backed government asked European leaders in Brussels for more money to cope with the crisis.
But instead of getting better treatment, migrants found at sea are being returned to Libya to face more exploitation and violence.
Meanwhile, the number of migrants departing from Libya is surging, with more than 70,000 arriving in Italy so far this year, a 28 percent increase over the same period last year. More than 2,000 have drowned crossing the Mediterranean Sea, and the summer peak season for sea crossings is just starting.
Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni said June 29 that Italy needed the help of the EU after 10,000 migrants were rescued off its southern coast in one week alone. That prompted a dinner meeting Sunday in Paris with the interior ministers of Italy, France and Germany, as well as the European Union commissioner in charge of migration.
Italian officials have threatened they may bar entry to Italian ports of non-Italian ships carrying migrants picked up at sea, and have suggested rescued migrants be taken straight to other EU countries.
EU officials are working with international organizations and the Libyan government to address the concerns about migrant treatment and placement, spokesman Catherine Ray said.
"We are aware of the unacceptable conditions in which some migrants are treated, in detention or reception centers in Libya," she said. "And we do not turn a blind eye to it."
Human trafficking is now a multibillion-dollar business involving countless militias and influential tribes, activists and security officials say. The Western-backed government in Libya exerts little authority outside the capital, Tripoli, and infighting is rampant within some of its ministries. Tripoli competes with two other governments, and none has real authority in the southern part of the country, where most migrants are smuggled through.
"No one even thinks about making arrests in the south," said Ahmed Tabawi Wardako, a Libyan tribal leader and community activist in the southern city of Sabha. "The human traffickers have lots of money. They buy off people, including the police and local officials."
Tripoli has two main government-run detention centers. A third in the coastal city of Zawiyah is controlled by a militia that U.N. investigators say is involved in human trafficking.
"[Trafficking victims] are not treated like humans," Wardako said. "They are treated like merchandise."
Road of death
In March, Mack Williams left his home in Ivory Coast's commercial capital of Abidjan. He was 29 and unemployed. With money borrowed from relatives, he traveled several days and hundreds of miles by bus to the smuggling town of Agadez in central Niger, on the edge of the Sahara Desert.
A recruiter introduced him to a "connection man," one of the many middlemen on the migrant pipeline to Europe.
For about $600, Williams was transported across the border, through Sabha and the town of Bani Walid, and then to Tripoli. At each stop, another connection man was expected to guide him along -- if he survived.
"It's the road of death," Williams said, referring to the 1,400-mile stretch between Agadez and Sabha, typically a weeklong drive through intense desert heat.
The deaths of migrants along the land route seldom draw much attention. In a rare instance, the International Organization for Migration reported in June that 44 migrants, including five children, died of thirst when their vehicle broke down in the Saharan desert. A few weeks later, 51 more were presumed dead after smugglers abandoned them, the agency said.
Other migrants said that when someone fell off a truck, the drivers often left them behind to die in the desert.
Williams, who is tall and slender, was packed into a Toyota pickup truck with two dozen other migrants, "stuck like a piece of fish in the back," he recalled. Food and water were in short supply. Breaks were infrequent. If the migrants took too long to urinate on the side of the road, the driver and his companion would beat them with a stick and prod them like cattle back into the truck.
Three days into the journey, as they neared the Libyan border, the traffickers spotted a convoy of troops from Niger and were worried about being caught. They veered off the road and ordered the migrants to get out of the truck and get down -- and then sped away.
"They left us in the desert with no water or food," Williams said.
Two days later, as some of the migrants approached death, another Toyota pickup arrived with a different group of traffickers. None had the same name or contact information Williams was given in Agadez. He understood what had happened.
"If your connection man doesn't come, it means you've been sold," he said. "Anyone can sell you to another group."
Extortion
When Ishmael Konte, a 25-year-old from Sierra Leone, arrived in Sabha, nearly 500 miles south of Tripoli, the traffickers drove directly to a warehouse and sold him to a Libyan.
It was one of numerous "connection houses" where migrants wait while they are moved through the smuggling pipeline.
Konte and the 20 other migrants in the truck with him were put in a tiny cell, where guards -- mostly from Niger -- beat them with pipes and electric cables for the slightest infraction. Every two days, they were given a bowl of gruel. Other food had to be bought from the guards, Konte said, but most of the migrants had no money.
"We had to drink the water in the toilet," said Alassana Bah, 34, a soft-voiced teacher from Gambia who lost his left arm in an accident years ago. "Every day, they beat me on the soles of my feet."
The men were incarcerated for different reasons. Some still owed money for their journey, others had traveled on credit and were now the property of the smugglers. Most, like Konte, said they had paid in full but were tricked by their drivers and sold to the prison's Libyan owner for as little as $50.
Every morning, the guards would force the migrants to call their relatives back home.
Four days after he arrived, Konte called his mother. As he spoke, a guard whipped him with a thick cable. She could hear his cries.
"People have caught me," he recalled telling her. "They want $400."
"Where can I get such money?" she replied. Konte could hear her weeping.
"You have to," he said. "These people will kill me."
It took Konte's mother a month to raise the money. She wired it to an associate of the traffickers in Agadez, and Konte was released. For the next few weeks, he worked in Sabha to earn enough to pay for his trip to Tripoli.
Detention centers
The Libyan coast guard and local fishermen have stopped more than 10,000 migrants this year and sent them back to Libya, according to International Organization for Migration data. Most have ended up in one of Libya's 29 official detention centers, which international aid and medical charities visit.
All are woefully underfunded, in part because of militia and government rivalries. Funding has been frozen, and bills to feed migrants haven't been paid in months, according to Capt. Wajdi Muntassar, a police officer who runs a detention center. Two other officials confirmed his statement.
Abdulrazag Shneeti, a spokesman for the government's Department for Combating Illegal Migration, did not respond to repeated calls for comment.
The coastal city of Zawiyah that is controlled by a militia allegedly involved in human trafficking.
The Zawiyah facility -- known as the al-Nasr detention center -- was set up by the al-Nasr Brigade, a militia involved in oil and human smuggling that has links to the coast guard, U.N. investigators said in a report released in June. Christine Petre, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, said the facility is now being run by the Western-backed government, but migrants and coast guard members said the militia and its tribesmen are still in charge.
Migrants sleep and eat on the dirty floors. Lunch is a six-inch loaf of bread. Dinner is a plate of macaroni.
On a recent day, the mattresses had been taken away from a group in a cell as "punishment" for fighting, said Fathi al-Far, the center's director. Last year, he said, four migrants were killed and a guard was injured in clashes.
In their report, U.N. investigators described Far as a former army colonel and said the center is used to sell migrants to other smugglers.
Far acknowledged that smugglers come to the center to take migrants but said he is unable to stop them. Guards or militia members call the migrants' families to extort cash. If they pay, the migrant is released and put back on a boat to Europe.
"The guards can do anything," Far said. "They have the keys to the cells."
Information for this article was contributed by Sudarsan Raghavan of The Washington Post; and by Gregory Viscusi of Bloomberg News.s
A Section on 07/03/2017