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Special Report: Enslaved in Libya – One woman’s extraordinary escape from Islamic State

The hands of Eritrean migrant Ruta Fisehaye

By Selam Gebrekidan

(Reuters) – On the night of June 2, 2015, gunmen blocked a highway on Libya’s northern coast and stopped a white truck speeding toward Tripoli, the capital. The men trained their assault rifles on the driver. Three climbed aboard to search the cargo.

Ruta Fisehaye, a 24-year-old Eritrean, was lying on the bed of the truck’s first trailer. Beside her lay 85 Eritrean men and women, one of whom was pregnant. A few dozen Egyptians hid in the second trailer. All shared one dream — to reach Europe.

The gunmen ordered the migrants off the truck. They separated Muslims from Christians and, then, men from women. They asked those who claimed to be Muslims to recite the Shahada, a pledge to worship only Allah. All of the Egyptians shouted the words in unison.

“There is no god but God. Muhammad is the messenger of God.”

“Allahu Akbar,” the gunmen called back.

Fisehaye realized then that she was in the hands of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Her captors wore robes with beige camouflage print — clothes she had not seen on other men in Libya. Most of them hid behind black ski masks. A black flag waved from one of their pickup trucks.

“We were certain that they were taking us to our deaths,” recalled Fisehaye, a Christian who wears a black-thread necklace to symbolize her Orthodox faith. “We cried in despair.”

Her captors had another end in mind.

As Islamic State battles to expand in Libya, it is rewarding its warriors by exploiting the great exodus of African migrants bound for Europe.

Since the group emerged in Libya in late 2014, some 240,000 migrants and refugees have traversed the war-torn country. Over the past 18 months, Islamic State fighters have abducted at least 540 refugees in six separate ambushes, according to 14 migrants who witnessed the abductions and have since escaped to Europe.

The fighters then enslaved, raped, sold or exchanged at least 63 captive women, nine of whom described their ordeal in detail to Reuters. Their stories comprise the first corroborated account of how Islamic State turns refugee women into sex slaves using them as human currency to attract and reward fighters in Libya. It is the same blueprint of abuse it employed on Yazidi women in Syria and Iraq.

Because of its proximity to southern Europe, and its shared borders with six African nations, Libya is Islamic State’s most important outpost outside Syria and Iraq. It is territory that the group is fighting hard to defend.

In August, U.S. fighter jets bombed Sirte — the stronghold of Islamic State in Libya — in an attempt to wrench the city from the group’s control. The airstrikes have revived a stalled military assault that Libyan brigades launched earlier this summer.

Sirte is strategically important for Islamic State. The city sits on a highway connecting two hubs of Libya’s people-smuggling trade — Ajdabiya in the northeast, where migrants stop to settle fees with smugglers, and fishing ports in the west, where boats depart for Europe every week.

From this bastion, Islamic State has found numerous ways to profit from the refugee crisis, despite the group’s declaration that migration is “a dangerous major sin” in the September issue of its magazine, “Dabiq.”

The extremist group has taxed smugglers in exchange for safe passage and has used well-beaten smuggling routes to bring in new fighters, according to Libyan residents interviewed by phone, a senior U.S. official and a U.N. Security Council report published in July.

Brigadier Mohamed Gnaidy, an intelligence officer with local forces mustered by the nearby town of Misrata, says Islamic State has recruited migrants to join its ranks, offering them money and Libyan brides.

It has also extracted human chattel from the stream of refugees passing through its territory, according to the accounts of Fisehaye and the other survivors who were interviewed. Five of six mass kidnappings verified by Reuters took place on a 160-km stretch near Sirte in March, June, July, August and September of last year. The sixth occurred near Libya’s border with Sudan this January.

This story is based on interviews with Fisehaye, eight other women enslaved by Islamic State, and five men kidnapped by the group. Reuters spoke to the refugees in three European countries over four months. Two women agreed to speak on the record, risking the stigma that besets survivors of sexual violence. Reuters was unable to reach the Islamic State fighters in Libya or independently corroborate certain aspects of the women’s accounts.

BETTER SHOT THAN BEHEADED

Before she left Eritrea, Fisehaye (rhymes with Miss-ha-day) felt trapped in her job as a storekeeper for a government-owned farm. Like most young Eritreans, she was a conscript in the country’s long-term national service, which lasts well beyond the 18 months mandated by law. She could hardly get by on her meager wages of $36 a month. But she also felt she could not quit and risk angering the state, which is often accused of human-rights violations.

Fisehaye, a petite woman whose smile easily takes over her entire face, decided to take a risk. In January 2015, she walked across the border into Sudan with a cousin and two friends, her heart set on Europe.

In Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, Fisehaye spent four months raising the $1,400 she needed to pay a smuggler for a trip to Libya. She tried and failed to find a lucrative job. So, like thousands of refugees before her, she called on relatives abroad to pitch in. She talked to recent émigrés and found an Eritrean smuggler whose clients gave him a glowing review.

Before setting off into the desert, she heard stories about armed outlaws who rape women in Libya. She paid a doctor for a contraceptive injection that would last for three months.

“Once you leave Eritrea, there is no going back. I did what any woman would do,” she said.

The first leg of her journey went off without a hitch. In May, her convoy crossed the Sahara and reached Ajdabiya in northeast Libya. Fisehaye believed the worst was behind her. Though no one counts migrants who die from sickness, starvation and violence in the desert, refugee groups say more may perish there than drown in the Mediterranean Sea.

“No one stopped us in the Sahara … and the smugglers told us we shouldn’t worry about Daesh,” she said, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “I never expected to see an organized state like theirs in Libya.”

She was wrong.

On the night of the kidnapping, the armed Islamic State fighters ordered Fisehaye and the other Christians back onto the truck. The men climbed onto the front trailer and the women, 22 in all, onto the back. They drove east, threading the same road they had driven hours earlier. A pickup truck with a mounted machine gun trailed close behind.

A half hour later, the truck turned right onto a dirt road and the soft glow of a town’s lights shimmered ahead. A few male captives had seen videos of Islamic State beheadings. Realizing the gunmen belonged to the group, the men jumped off and ran into the flat desert. Gunfire erupted. Some fell dead, others were rounded up. A few got away.

“We thought it would be better to get shot than beheaded,” Hagos Hadgu, one of the men who jumped off the truck, said in an interview in Hållsta, Sweden. He wasn’t caught that night and made it to Europe two months later. “We didn’t want to die with our hands and legs bound. Even an animal needs to writhe in the hour of death.”

The fighters deposited the migrants at an abandoned hospital perched in a scrubland near a desert town called Nawfaliyah. They searched the women for jewelry, lifting their sleeves and necklines with a rod, and hauled them into a small room where a Nigerian woman was being kept.

The next morning, one of the fighters’ leaders, a man from West Africa, paid the women a visit. He brought a young boy, one of at least seven Eritrean children Islamic State had kidnapped in March, to serve as his translator.

“Do you know who we are?” the man asked.

The women were silent.

“We are al-dawla al-Islamiyyah,” the man explained, using the Arabic for Islamic State.

He reminded the women that Islamic State was the group that had slain 30 Eritrean and Ethiopian Christians back in April, filmed the massacre, and posted the video online. The caliphate would spare their lives because they were women, he assured them, but only if they converted to Islam.

“Or we will let you rot here,” he warned.

Fisehaye found conversion an unholy thought. Along with the other women, she fired a volley of questions at the man: Can we call our families and tell them where we are? Can they pay you a ransom for our freedom? Can you tell us what you did to our brothers? Our husbands?

The man offered few answers and no solace.

Three weeks later, in the first week of Ramadan in June, fighter jets bombed the abandoned hospital compound and some of the buildings collapsed. It is difficult to determine who was behind the attack. Both the U.S. military and western Libyan groups have claimed raids on nearby towns around that time.

In the ensuing chaos, Fisehaye and the other women sprinted past the debris and ran barefoot into the desert. The hot ground seared their feet. The captive men, who had been held in the same compound all along, ran ahead.

Before long, the fleeing captives made out the silhouettes of a pickup truck and men with assault rifles ahead of them. The armed men waved for the migrants to stop then opened fire. The women stopped. Most of the migrant men escaped, but eleven were rounded up and flogged. Their whereabouts are unknown.

The airstrikes continued through the week. Eventually, Islamic State fighters moved the women to the abandoned quarters of a Turkish construction company in Nawfaliyah, two hours away.

The makeshift prison housed graders and dozers from road-work projects of the mid-2000s, their metal bodies rusting under the intense heat. Itinerant workers had scribbled their names and countries on the compound’s walls. Fisehaye and the other women stayed in a small room where the drywall sweated when temperatures rose. A Korean family — a pediatrician, his wife and her brother — were jailed in another room.

It only took a week for Fisehaye and the other women to attempt another breakout. Nine escaped, but not Fisehaye. Instead, she was brought back to the makeshift prison and whipped for days. The Korean doctor tended to her wounds.

A few weeks later, in early August, 21 other Eritrean women joined Fisehaye’s group. They too had been kidnapped along a stretch of highway in central Libya. One woman came with her three children, aged five, seven and eleven.

CONVERSION

Throughout the summer, Islamic State consolidated its hold in central Libya. In Sirte, Islamic State fighters crushed a Salafist uprising by executing dissenters and hanging their bodies from lampposts. In Nawfaliyah, they paraded decapitated heads to silence dissent.

Then, in September, the group’s emir in Libya, Abul-Mughirah Al-Qahtani (more commonly known as Abu Nabil), advertised his domain’s “great need of every Muslim who can come.” He summoned fighters, doctors, legal experts and administrators who could help him build a functioning state. He levied hefty taxes on businesses and confiscated enemy property, just as his group had done in Syria and Iraq.

The ranks of Islamic State fighters swelled. At its peak, the group may have had 6,000 fighters in Libya, based on the U.S. Army’s estimates, although the Pentagon drastically cut that estimate this month to a thousand fighters in Sirte.

The single men, most of whom flocked from other parts of Africa, needed companions, and Islamic State enlisted older women in Sirte to help. The women, called ‘crows’ because they dressed in black, visited townspeople’s homes and registered single girls older than 15 as potential brides, says Brigadier Gnaidy of the Misrata forces.

As the group’s ambitions grew that summer, so did its need for women. Islamic State’s take on sharia permits men to take sex slaves. The kidnapped women, unprotected and far from home, became easy targets. In mid-August, more than two months after Fisehaye was abducted, Islamic State fighters moved the 36 women in their custody to Harawa, a small town they controlled some 75 kilometers (46 miles) from Sirte.

As Fisehaye and the seven other women Reuters interviewed describe it, life in Harawa was almost quotidian at first.

There were no air strikes, beatings or threats of sexual violence. The captives — the Eritreans kidnapped in June and August, including Fisehaye, two Nigerians, and the Korean couple and their relative — lived in a large compound by the town’s dam. In the next few weeks, they were joined by 10 Filipino medical workers kidnapped from a hospital in Sirte, a Bangladeshi lecturer taken from a Sirte university, a pregnant Ghanaian captured in Sirte, and an Eritrean woman captured with her 4-year-old son on the highway to Tripoli.

It was here that Fisehaye bonded with Simret Kidane, a 29 year-old who left her three children with her parents in Eritrea to seek a better life in Europe. She was among the women kidnapped in August.

Kidane befriended one of the guards, Hafeezo, a Tunisian mechanic turned jihadist in his early 30s. Hafeezo helped the women navigate their new life in captivity. He brought them groceries and relayed their demands to his superiors in Sirte. He comforted them when they cried. He counseled them to forget their past lives and embrace Islam. That way, he promised, they may be freed to find a husband among the militants. They may even be allowed to call home.

The women asked for religious lessons, and Hafeezo brought them a copy of the Koran translated into their first language, Tigrinya. He also brought a small Dell laptop and a flash drive on which he had uploaded religious texts and lessons on the lives of fallen jihadists.

Fisehaye succumbed first. In September, after three months of captivity, she converted to Islam and took on a Muslim name, Rima. Her conversion had a domino effect across the compound; Kidane and the others followed suit a month later.

“I could see no other way out,” Fisehaye said. “Islam was one more step to my freedom. They told us we would have some rights as Muslims.”

After their conversion, Hafeezo brought them black abayas and niqabs, loose garments some Muslim women wear to cover themselves. He kept his distance and refused to make eye contact. Instead, he supervised their piety from afar.

Another guard, an older Sudanese fighter, taught them to pray. He recited verses from the Koran and made the women write down and repeat his words. When the guard moved to a new job in Sirte, Hafeezo brought a flat-screen TV and played them videos of religious lessons and suicide missions. As promised, Hafeezo allowed the women to call their families.

In December, frequent gunfire punctured the relatively quiet life in Harawa. Food became scarce. Hafeezo was often called to the frontline and disappeared for days. One day, he took Kidane aside and told her to prepare for what was to come. The leadership had changed — Islamic State’s emir in Libya had died in a U.S. airstrike a month earlier — and the women’s fate along with it.

“You are now [[i]]sabaya,[[/i]]” Hafeezo told Kidane, using the archaic term for slave. There were four possible outcomes for her and the other women, he explained. Their respective owners could make them their sex slaves, give them away as gifts, sell them to other militias, or set them free.

“Do not worry about what will happen to you in the hands of men,” Kidane says Hafeezo told her. “Concern yourself only with where you stand with Allah.”

Kidane did not share this detail with Fisehaye or the other women, hoping to save them from despair.

Later, one of Hafeezo’s superiors came to the compound to take a census. He wrote the women’s names and ages on a ledger. He asked them to lift their veils and examined their faces. He returned a week later and took two of the youngest women, aged 15 and 18, with him. On December 17, he sent for Kidane. That day, he gave her to a Libyan member of an Islamic State brigade in Sirte. Despite her repeated pleas, her new owner refused to reunite her with Fisehaye.

Kidane and the teenage women escaped and are now seeking asylum in Germany.

SABAYA

In late January, a stomach ulcer confined Fisehaye to her bed. Stress made matters worse. Returning from a hospital visit one afternoon, she witnessed a child, no older than 9, shoot a man in the town square.

Soon after, she and the remaining female captives moved to a warehouse in Sirte where Islamic State stored appliances, fuel and slaves. A group of 15 Eritrean women, who had been kidnapped in July, and three Ethiopian women kidnapped in January joined them that week.

The warehouse became, to the women, a last frontier of defiance. As new Muslims, they argued for better healthcare and the abolition of their slavery. They absorbed beatings in response.

Resistance proved futile. An Eritrean fighter called Mohamed, who had often dropped by to survey the women, purchased Fisehaye in February. He never said how much he paid for her. But he seemed gentle at first, asking after her waning health and her past life in Eritrea.

“I was confused. I thought he was going to help me. Maybe he had infiltrated Daesh. Maybe he wasn’t really one of them. I started harboring hope,” Fisehaye said.

Instead, he raped her, repeatedly, for weeks.

“No one ever showed us which part of the Koran says they could turn us into slaves,” Fisehaye said. “They wanted to destroy us…so much evil in their hearts.”

She plotted her escape but could not find a way out.

Then her owner lent her to another man, a Senegalese fighter. Known by the nom de guerre Abu Hamza, the Senegalese had brought his wife and three children to the Libyan frontline. Fisehaye was to work, unpaid, in Abu Hamza’s kitchen.

The work was busy but bearable, until one night in mid-February when Abu Hamza brought an Eritrean woman from the warehouse. He raped the woman all night.

“She was screaming. Screaming. It tore my heart,” Fisehaye recalled. “His wife stood by the door and cried.”

The next morning, Fisehaye convinced the battered woman to run away with her. They left the city behind and ran into the desert. No one stopped to help them and they were caught by religious police on patrol outside the city.

The police returned both women to captivity. The battered Eritrean woman went back to Abu Hamza. Mohamed took Fisehaye to a three-story building in Sirte that he shared with two other fighters.

Fisehaye moved in with a 22-year-old Eritrean woman and her 4-year-old son, both of whom belonged to a Tunisian commander named Saleh. Another 23-year-old Eritrean lived down the hall with her 2-year-old son and a daughter to whom she gave birth while in Islamic State custody. That woman and her children belonged to a Nigerian fighter who called himself al-Baghdadi.

Fisehaye’s roommates said the men raped them on multiple occasions. They told their stories on condition of anonymity.

“There was no one there to help me. So I kept quiet and took the abuse,” the Eritrean mother of two later said. “I stopped resisting. He did as he pleased with me.”

ESCAPE

In April of this year, Libya’s nascent unity government stationed itself in a naval base in Tripoli. Separately, rival factions — the Petroleum Facilities Guard in the east and brigades from towns in the west — plotted to attack Islamic State from opposite flanks.

In Sirte, meanwhile, Fisehaye and her roommates learned that one of them, the mother of two, would soon be sold to another man.

The revelation pushed them to plot an escape. They pretended to call their relatives but talked, instead, to Eritrean smugglers in Tripoli. They studied their captors’ schedules. They surveyed their surroundings whenever the Tunisian commander Saleh, in a cruel prank, left the house keys with his slave but took her son with him.

Finally, on the early morning of April 14, the women grabbed 60 Libyan dinars, about $40, from Saleh’s bag and broke out of the house through a backdoor. But Sirte looked ominously deserted in the early morning and, fearing they would be caught, the women returned to the house.

They ventured out again, hours later, when the city came to life. They walked for hours before a cab stopped for them. Fisehaye negotiated with the driver in halting Arabic. She told him they were maids who had been swindled by an employer. She gave him a number for an Eritrean smuggler in Tripoli.

The driver negotiated with the smuggler over the phone. He agreed to drive them for 750 dinars ($540), to be covered by the smuggler once the women arrived in Bani Walid, five hours away.

In the end, it took the women 12 hours to get to Bani Walid. As promised, the Eritrean smuggler paid for their escape and took them to a holding cell. There, they shucked off their niqabs and cried with joy. They prayed for the dozens they had left behind.

Fisehaye borrowed the smuggler’s phone and called her father in Eritrea. Soon, word of her escape spread among her friends and relatives. They settled her debt and paid the smuggler another $2,000 to get her on a boat to Europe.

In May, during a month when 1,133 refugees drowned at sea, Fisehaye crossed the Mediterranean. Her 10 months of captivity had come to an end.

She traversed a path trod by many refugees, across Italy and Austria, and reached Germany a month after her escape. She is now seeking asylum there.

(Gebrekidan reported from Ulm and Hanover, Germany; Catania and Rome, Italy; and Hållsta, Fur and Vetlanda, Sweden; Additional reporting by Patrick Markey and Aidan Lewis in Sirte, Libya; Ali Al-Shouky in Marsa Matrouh, Egypt; and Jonathan Landay in Washington; Edited by Alessandra Galloni)

Out of sight, out of mind? Europe’s migrant crisis still simmers

A woman sits and looks on outside a building covered up with sheets to protect the dwellers from the strong summer sun outside of the disused Hellenikon airport, where stranded refugees and migrants are temporarily accommodated in Athens, Greece,

By Michele Kambas and Antonio Bronic

ATHENS/ZAGREB (Reuters) – A year after hundreds of thousands of refugees snaked their way across southeastern Europe and onto global television screens, the roads through the Balkans are now clear, depriving an arguably worsening tragedy of poignant visibility.

Europe’s migrant crisis is at the very least numerically worse than it was last year. More people are arriving and more are dying. But the twist is that, compared with last year, a lot of it is out of sight.

Take the border between Greece and Macedonia. Summer crops have replaced the city of tents at the border outpost of Idomeni, even if some locals are convinced there is an unseen population hiding in the surrounding forests, waiting for smugglers to assist them on their onward journey.

The tiny Greek village was a focal point of the migrant flow north toward Germany and other wealthy countries, with thousands of refugees squatting for months waiting for sealed borders with Macedonia to open

Elsewhere in the Balkans, a Reuters photographer, revisiting the people-packed locations where he and his colleagues captured last year’s diaspora, found empty roads, unencumbered railway tracks and bucolic countryside.

The comparison is stark.

More than one million people fleeing conflict in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan made their way to Europe last year, with the majority of them crossing the precarious sea corridor separating Greece and Turkey, the temporary home for more than 2 million refugees displaced from Syria.

They came carrying their worldly belongings in plastic bags and hauling babies on weary shoulders, a visual exodus of the kind not seen in Europe since the end of World War Two.

Many have since reached their destination in northern Europe, but with the borders closed and the European Union now attempting to contain the numbers, thousands are stuck at holding centers in Greece and Italy.

They are not so nearly visible there – nor are the ones still coming.

VISIBILITY DOWN, ARRIVALS UP

According to data from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), arrivals are up 17 percent on last year, stoked mainly by a spike at the start of the year through Greece.

Deaths among those trying to get to Europe, mainly due to drowning, are up more than 15 percent.

“This is not a blip,” said David Miliband, a former British foreign minister who now heads the International Rescue Committee, an aid group set up by Albert Einstein – himself a refugee – to rescue Europeans before the outbreak of World War Two.

“The forces that are driving more and more people from their homes – weak states, big tumults within the Islamic world, a divided international system .. None of these things are likely to abate soon.”

Some of the mantle of accepting huge migrant flows that was carried by Greece last year and the beginning of this one has been taken up by Italy.

This follows a resurgence of migrant flows from northern Africa. More than 140,000 asylum seekers are now housed in Italian shelters, a seven-fold increase on 2013, with the migrant crisis in its third year.

In Greece, where arrivals plunged in the wake of an accord between Turkey and the EU to stem the flow in March, an estimated 57,000 migrants were still stuck in the country by Aug.8.

Campaigners say the accord has lulled policymakers into a false sense of accomplishment by allowing them to believe that Europe’s migration problem has been solved.

“By outsourcing the responsibility to Turkey and to Greece, European governments are basically saying ‘we have solved the crisis because we don’t see it, and we can’t smell it and we can’t hear it,” said Gauri van Gulik, deputy Europe director at Amnesty International.

“The crisis is as big as ever, and as yet unsolved by governments,” she told Reuters.

IOM data says that 258,186 people arrived in Europe by the end of July, compared with 219,854 over the same period in 2015. There were 3,176 fatalities by Aug. 7, outpacing the 2,754 who died in the first eight months of last year, a slightly longer period.

“Its absolutely incredible because if you think about the panic this caused last year and the incentive there was to really get some policy changes in place, nothing has happened,” Van Gulik said.

(Additional reporting by Steve Scherer in Rome, Lefteris Papadimas in Athens Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

Bodies found off coast of Libya as migrant toll climbs: IOM

Migrants await rescue in dinghy

GENEVA (Reuters) – The bodies of 120 migrants believed to have been trying to reach Italy by boat from Libya have been found off the Libyan coast over the past 10 days, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Tuesday.

“We are getting this information from Libyan authorities that we are collaborating with,” said IOM spokesman Joel Millman. The bodies had been discovered near Sabratha and had not come from previously known shipwrecks in the Mediterranean.

Mainly African migrants are taking often unseaworthy boats from Libya to Italy, gateway to Europe. Nearly 8,000 were rescued at sea between Friday to Monday on that central Mediterranean route, Millman told a briefing.

It is a longer and more perilous journey than that from Turkey to Greece, largely shut down since a deal was struck between the European Union and Turkey in March, although 174 migrants did make it by sea to Greece over the weekend, IOM said.

More than 257,000 migrants and refugees have already entered Europe by sea this year through July 27, and for the third straight year, at least 3,000 others have died, the agency said.

A total of 4,027 migrants or refugees have perished worldwide so far this year, three-quarters of them in the Mediterranean, Millman said.

The figures represents a 35 percent increase on the global toll during the first seven months of 2015, he said.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

Nearly 3,000 dead in Mediterranean already this year: IOM

Migrants waiting for rescue

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – Nearly 3,000 migrants and refugees have perished in the Mediterranean Sea already this year while almost 250,000 have reached Europe, the International Organization for Migration said on Friday.

The estimated death toll could put 2016 on track to be the deadliest year of the migration crisis. Last year the same landmark was only reached in October, by which time nearly one million people had crossed into Europe.

“This is the earliest that we have seen the 3,000 (deaths) mark, this occurred in September of 2014 and October of 2015,” IOM spokesman Joel Millman told a briefing. “So for this to be happening even before the end of July is quite alarming.”

Three out of four victims this year died while trying to reach Italy from North Africa, mostly Libya, a longer and more dangerous route. The others drowned between Turkey and Greece before that flow dried up with the March deal on migrants between Turkey and the European Union.

Nearly 2,500 fatalities have occurred since late March, with about 20 migrants dying each day along the route from Libya to Italy, Millman said. Most are from West Africa and the Horn of Africa, although they may include people from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Morocco.

“The (Libyan) coast guard has had some luck turning back voyages from Libya. We’ve heard in the last six weeks a number of cases where they have been able to turn boats back.

“They (have also been) recovering bodies at an alarming rate,” Millman said.

Some 84,052 migrants and refugees have arrived in Italy so far this year, almost exactly the same number as in the same period a year before, he said.

That indicated departures from Libya were at “maximum capacity” due to a limited number of boats deemed seaworthy.

But there is “a very robust market of used fishing vessels and things coming from Tunisia and Egypt that are finding their way to brokers in Tripoli,” Millman said. “And you can actually go to shipyards where people are trying to repair boats as fast as they can to get more migrants on the sea.”

Migrants in Libya are often held in detention centers, some run by criminal gangs and militias, he said. IOM officials seek access to detainees and authorization for their repatriation.

“There’s no question that in some of this range of detention (centers) there are people in league with smugglers who are moving people toward the smugglers,” Millman said.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Catherine Evans)

EU eyes Israeli technologies for spotting militants online

By Dan Williams

TEL AVIV (Reuters) – European powers are trying to develop better means for pre-emptively spotting “lone-wolf” militants from their online activities and are looking to Israeli-developed technologies, a senior EU security official said on Tuesday.

Last week’s truck rampage in France and Monday’s axe attack aboard a train in Germany have raised European concern about self-radicalized assailants who have little or no communications with militant groups that could be intercepted by spy agencies.

“How do you capture some signs of someone who has no contact with any organization, is just inspired and started expressing some kind of allegiance? I don’t know. It’s a challenge,” EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove told Reuters on the sidelines of a intelligence conference in Tel Aviv.

Internet companies asked to monitor their own platforms’ content for material that might flag militants had begged off, De Kerchove said.

He said they had argued that the information was too massive to sift through and contextualize, unlike pedophile pornography, for which there were automatic detectors.

“So maybe a human’s intervention is needed. So you cannot just let the machine do it,” De Kerchove said. But he said he hoped “we will soon find ways to be much more automated” in sifting through social networks.

“That is why I am here,” he said of his visit to Israel. “We know Israel has developed a lot of capability in cyber.”

ADVANCE WARNING

Beset by Palestinian street attacks, often by young individuals using rudimentary weapons and without links to armed factions, Israeli security agencies that once focused on “meta data”, or information regarding suspects’ communications patterns, have refocused on social media in hope of gaining advance warnings from private posts.

Israeli officials do not disclose how far the technology has come, but private experts say the methods are enough to provide often basic alerts regarding potential attackers, then require follow-up investigation.

“Nine out of 10 times, the terrorist has contacts with others who provide support or inspiration, so meta data still applies,” said Haim Tomer, a former Mossad intelligence division chief turned security consultant.

When it comes to true lone wolves, even a valedictory Facebook message can often be picked up by Israel, he said.

“But in such cases, it would be a low-level ‘green alert’, meaning the person should be looked at further, whereas a ‘red alert’ would warrant instant action. That leaves the security services to decide how to handle matters,” Tomer said.

As De Kerchove was at pains to make clear to the conference, European standards of civil rights, such as privacy, make the introduction of intrusive intelligence-gathering technologies in the public sphere and aggressive police follow-ups difficult.

While Israel’s emergency laws give security services more leeway, its intelligence minister, Yisrael Katz, called for cooperation with Internet providers rather than state crackdowns. He cited, for example, the encryption provided by messaging platform WhatsApp which, he said, could be a new way for militants to communicate and evade detection.

“We will not block these services,” Katz told the conference. “What is needed is an international organization, preferably headed by the United States, where shared (security) concerns need to be defined, characterized.”

(Editing by Jeffrey Heller/Mark Heinrich)

Terrorists smuggled into Europe with refugees, Merkel says

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel attends a working session at the NATO Summit in Warsaw, Poland July 9, 2016.

BERLIN (Reuters) – Militant groups smuggled some of their members into Europe in the wave of migrants who have fled from Syria, German Chancellor Angela said on Monday.

“In part, the refugee flow was even used to smuggle terrorists,” Merkel told a rally of her Christian Democrats in eastern Germany.

More than 1 million migrants arrived in Germany last year, many of them Syrians.

(Reporting by Noah Barkin and Paul Carrel)

Don’t give UK a generous Brexit deal, EU voters say: poll

European Union Flag

LONDON (Reuters) – Voters in Germany, France, Sweden and Finland think Britain should not be given a generous deal when it tries to renegotiate its ties with the European Union, an opinion poll published on Friday showed.

Germans and the French were most opposed to helping Britain out: 53 percent of respondents in both countries said it should not expect any favors compared with 27 percent who said the EU should offer Britain a generous deal, polling firm YouGov said.

Furthermore, nearly half of voters in the two EU heavyweight countries said they would support a free trade deal with Britain only if Britain agreed to continue to allow EU citizens to live and work in the country.

Opposition to the EU’s free movement of workers principle was one of the main campaign messages of those who wanted Britain to leave the bloc, a decision British voters backed in a referendum on June 23.

Britain has yet to notify the EU formally of its plan to leave, a step which would kick off a period of up to two years for its exit to be completed.

The front-runner to become Britain’s next prime minister, interior minister Theresa May, has said she wants to hold informal talks with the EU about the outlines of a deal before launching the two-year exit period.

Of five continental EU countries covered by YouGov’s poll, only voters in Denmark favored offering Britain a generous deal, the polling firm said.

YouGov interviewed 2,045 people in Germany, 1,008 people in France and around 1,000 people in each of Sweden, Finland and Denmark between June 30 and July 5.

(Writing by William Schomberg; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

Israel’s Netanyahu aims to head off criticism with diplomatic blitz

Benjamin Netanyahu Israel Prime Minister in meeting

By Luke Baker

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fly to Rome on Sunday to try to fend off pressure from the United States and Europe over his settlements policy and opposition to a French-led effort to forge peace with the Palestinians.

Beginning three days of intense diplomacy, the right-wing premier will meet U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, in the Italian capital, followed by talks with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in Jerusalem.

One of Netanyahu’s immediate concerns is a forthcoming report from the Middle East Quartet, a mediation group made up of the United States, EU, United Nations and Russia, that is expected to use unusually tough language in criticising Israel’s expansion of settlements on occupied land that the Palestinians seek for an independent state.

Diplomats confirmed that the current language in the report is strong, on the one hand condemning Israel’s unchecked building of settlement homes, which is considered illegal under international law, and on the other persistent Palestinian incitement against Israel during a recent wave of violence.

What is unclear is whether the wording may be softened before the report is issued, probably next week, although its publication has already been delayed several times.

“As it stands, the language is strong and Israel isn’t going to like it,” said one diplomat briefed on the content. “But it’s also not saying that much that hasn’t been said before – that settlements are a serious obstacle to peace.”

Netanyahu spoke by phone to Russian President Vladimir Putin this week as part of his efforts to keep the Kremlin closely updated on developments in the region. The leaders have met face-to-face four times in the past year, with one Israeli official saying the two had developed a good understanding.

As well as a desire to defang the Quartet report, there are a series of issues Netanyahu needs to broach with Kerry, including how to conclude drawn-out negotiations with Washington on a new, 10-year defence agreement.

There is also the looming issue of a peace conference organised by the French that is supposed to convene in the autumn, although it may no longer take place in Paris.

Israeli officials oppose the initiative, seeing it as side-stepping the need for Israel and the Palestinians to sit down and negotiate directly. They argue that it provides the Palestinians a chance to internationalise the conflict, rather than dealing with the nitty-gritty on the ground.

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, who addressed the European Parliament on Wednesday, said Israel was feeling impatience with Europe and now was not the right time to push for peace.

“Currently, the practical conditions, the political and regional circumstances, which would enable us to reach a permanent agreement between us — the Israelis and the Palestinians — are failing to materialise,” he said.

Many diplomats also question whether the French initiative can inject life into an all-but-defunct peace process, which last broke down in 2014, but they are willing to try.

A nagging concern for Israel is that the conference will end up fixing a time frame for an agreement on ending Israel’s 49-year-old occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and reaching a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

If that doesn’t emerge from the French plan, it remains possible that a resolution along similar lines could be presented to the United Nations Security Council before the end of the year. That is another reason why Netanyahu will be eager to sit down with Ban for talks on Tuesday.

(Writing by Luke Baker; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

U.S. warns of possible terrorist attacks in Europe

A group of tourists walk through the streets in downtown Valencia

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department warned Americans on Tuesday of the possible threat of terrorist attacks in Europe this summer, saying targets could include tourist sites, restaurants and large events such as the European Soccer Championship in France.

“We are alerting U.S. citizens to the risk of potential terrorist attacks throughout Europe, targeting major events, tourist sites, restaurants, commercial centers and transportation,” it said in a travel alert expiring Aug. 31.

“The large number of tourists visiting Europe in the summer months will present greater targets for terrorists planning attacks in public locations, especially at large events.”

The travel alert noted that France will host the UEFA Euro 2106 soccer championship from June 10 to July 10 and that the French government had extended its state of emergency, imposed after the Nov. 13 Paris attacks that killed 130 people, through July 26 to cover the July 2-24 Tour de France bicycle race.

“Euro Cup stadiums, fan zones, and unaffiliated entertainment venues broadcasting the tournaments in France and across Europe represent potential targets for terrorists, as do other large-scale sporting events and public gathering places throughout Europe,” the department said.

It also said the Catholic Church’s World Youth Day event is expected to draw up to 2.5 million visitors to Krakow, Poland, between July 26 and July 31, saying local infrastructure may be strained by the large number of visitors to Poland.

“Poland will impose border controls at all of its national borders from July 4 to August 2, and visitors to Poland during this period should be prepared to show their passport and undergo stricter security screening throughout Poland,” it said.

(Reporting by Arshad Mohammed; Editing by James Dalgleish)

Celebrities urge British government to reunite refugee children with families

Refugees and migrants children interact with each other at a temporary transit facility at the British sovereign base of Dhekelia in Cyprus

By Lin Taylor

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Celebrities, athletes and pop stars have urged the British government to do more to reunite unaccompanied refugee children with their families in Britain.

Launching a campaign by the United Nations children’s agency (UNICEF) on Friday, tennis champion Andy Murray and actor Roger Moore were among celebrities calling on the government to take in more lone children stranded at migrant camps across Europe.

According to UNICEF, tens of thousands of unaccompanied refugee children are stranded in Europe, even though many of them have relatives living in Britain.

“For these children the chance to be reunited with their family in the U.K. could be life-changing and (would) make sure they’re kept safe from violence, exploitation and abuse,” said Murray.

Olympic cycling gold medalist Chris Hoy said: “There are unaccompanied refugee children in Europe risking their lives to reach relatives in the UK despite having the legal right to be brought here safely. The government must do more to reunite [them].”

In one case cited by UNICEF, a 16-year-old refugee boy referred to as Bilal had left Syria when he was 14 to join his brother in London, and had had to travel alone for more than a year before the pair were reunited.

“When I made it to France, I had to wait in the Calais Jungle for seven months and it was a living hell,” Bilal was quoted as saying.

“I saw people die trying to escape. I saw people beaten to death in the camp… I want people like me, who have family in the UK, to come here and be safe. It is taking too long and too many children are suffering,” he said.

Prime Minister David Cameron has said that children fleeing the conflict in Syria are “relatively safe” once they reach Europe and that the government does not want to encourage more Syrians, including unaccompanied children, to attempt the hazardous journey to the West.

In April the Home Office (Interior Ministry) said that up to 3,000 Syrian and other child refugees from camps in the Middle East and North Africa are to be resettled in Britain over the next four years.

UNICEF said that if the Home Office had 10 more officials working to reunite families, all 157 lone children at the Calais camp who have relatives in Britain could be living with their families by September.

Other celebrities supporting the campaign included singers Jessie Ware, Emma Bunton and Rita Ora, actor Ewan McGregor, and model Claudia Schiffer.

(Reporting by Lin Taylor @linnytayls, Editing by Jo Griffin.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters that covers humanitarian news, conflicts, land rights, modern slavery and human trafficking, women’s rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories)