Police from more than 10 European countries have arrested 75 people throughout Europe involved in smuggling people from Iraq and other countries into northern Europe, French officials said.
Some 1,300 police officers from 10 countries were involved in the sweep, dubbed Operation Baghdad.
Investigators believe hundreds of people have been smuggled from Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere to Britain and Scandinavia.
Nearly a third of the arrests were made in France on Monday. Other countries involved in the sweep were Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Ireland, Norway and Sweden.
The smuggled immigrants were mostly Iraqi Kurds but also included nationals from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, China and Turkey.
French and German authorities said those smuggled paid between $9,300 and $21,000 to be taken to Europe.
The smuggling network was operated by men of various nationalities, many of whom were of Middle Eastern descent.
The latest sweep is just a drop in the ocean in the illegal human smuggling industry, Jonathan Martens, from the International Organization for Migration’s migration management services department, told The Media Line.
“We’ve seen large volumes of people smuggled from Africa to Europe. There are regular boatloads of people from the Horn of Africa to the Middle East. This is a global phenomenon,” Martens said.
Over the past few years dozens of Africans have perished at sea after illegal smugglers charged excessive sums of money to take them on rickety boats to Yemen. Often the smugglers throw them off the boat before they reach the shore and leave them to die at sea.
Martens said that on a global level, many people who are smuggled have an education of some sort. They are exposed to the developed world through modern media and take advantage of illegal smuggling networks to realize their ambitions abroad, he explained.
If the country of origin is not a country of conflict and the national cannot file an asylum claim, the IOM’s position is that people should seek legal channels to migrate so as not to rely on smuggling networks.