Terrorism and Trafficking – an Alliance of Fear and Despair

With Loretta Napoleoni.
A powerful and sophisticated underground business delivers thousands of refugees a day all along the Mediterranean coasts of Europe. Overall, the trafficking industry today is bigger than the illegal drug trade and worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. 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 and, more recently, the destabilization of Syria and Iraq coupled with the rise of ISIS. New opportunities for crime have opened up in the Middle East, from selling Western hostages to jihadist groups, to trafficking millions of refugees. Loretta Napoleoni is a journalist, author and economist who has written and lectured widely on the financing of terrorism. As chairman of the counter terrorism financing group for the Club de Madrid, she brought heads of state from around the world together to create a new strategy for combatting the financing of terror networks, and her latest book Merchants of Men: How Jihadists and ISIS Turned Kidnapping and Refugee Trafficking into a Multi-Billion Dollar Business will be published in the UK in January 2017 by Atlantic Books.
Nearest tube station Farringdon. 6.45pm (doors open 6.30).