₦airaland Forum

Kobojunkie:
By the time his Libyan captors branded his face, Sunday Iabarot had already run away twice and had been sold three times.The gnarled scar that covers most of the left side of his face appears to show a crude number 3. His jailer carved it into his cheek with a fire-heated knife, cutting and cauterizing at the same time.

Iabarot left Nigeria in February 2016 with a plan to head northward and buy passage on a smuggler’s boat destined for Europe, where he had heard from friends on Facebook that jobs were plentiful. The journey of more than 2,500 miles would take him across the trackless desert plains of Niger and through the lawless tribal lands of southern Libya before depositing him at the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. He never made it. Instead, he was captured the moment he arrived in Libya, then sold to armed men who kept a stable of African migrants they exploited for labor and ransom.

The brand on his face, he says, was both punishment and a mark of identification. Fourteen other men who attempted to escape the fetid warehouse where they had been held as captive labor in Bani Walid, Libya, for several months in 2017 were similarly scarred, though the symbols differed. Iabarot, who is illiterate, wasn’t sure if they were numbers or letters or merely the twisted doodles of deranged men who saw their black captives as little more than livestock to be bought and sold. “It was as if we weren’t human,” the 32-year-old from Benin City, Nigeria, tells TIME.

Iabarot is among an estimated 650,000 men and women who have crossed the Sahara over the past five years dreaming of a better life in Europe. Some are fleeing war and persecution. Others, like Iabarot, are leaving villages where economic dysfunction and erratic rainfall make it impossible to find work or even enough to eat. To make the harrowing journey, they enlist the services of trans-Saharan smugglers who profit by augmenting their truckloads of weapons, drugs and other contraband goods with human cargo.

But along the way, tens of thousands like Iabarot are finding themselves treated not just as cargo but as chattel and trapped in a terrifying cycle of extortion, imprisonment, forced labor and prostitution, according to estimates by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. “They are not only facing inhuman treatment. They are being sold from one trafficker to another,” says Carlotta Sami, southern European regional spokesperson for UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency. Essentially, they are slaves: human beings who have been reduced to being possessions with a fixed value, based on assessments of the kind of income they can accrue to their owners as targets for extortion, as unpaid labor or—as is often the case with women—prostitutes.

Slavery may seem like a relic of history. But according to the U.N.’s International Labor Organization (ILO), there are more than three times as many people in forced servitude today as were captured and sold during the 350-year span of the transatlantic slave trade. What the ILO calls “the new slavery” takes in 25 million people in debt bondage and 15 million in forced marriage. As an illicit industry, it is one of the world’s most lucrative, earning criminal networks $150 billion a year, just behind drug smuggling and weapons trafficking. “Modern slavery is far and away more profitable now than at any point in human history,” says Siddharth Kara, an economist at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

The corridor from Africa’s most populous country to its northern Mediterranean shores has proved especially lucrative. As conflict, climate change and lack of opportunity push increasing numbers of people across borders, draconian E.U. policies designed to curb migration funnel them into the hands of modern-day slave drivers. The trade might be most visible in Libya, where aid organizations and journalists have documented actual slave auctions. But now it is seeping into southern Europe too—in particular Italy, where vulnerable migrants are being forced to toil unpaid in the fields picking tomatoes, olives and citrus fruits and trafficked into prostitution rings.

“We no longer need slavers going into Africa to capture their quarry,” says Aboubakar Soumahoro, a union representative who came to Italy from Ivory Coast 17 years ago with the hope of finding a better life. “The rope of desperation has replaced their iron chains. Now Africans are sending themselves to Europe and becoming slaves in the process.”

When Iabarot reached Libya’s southern border, he met a seemingly friendly taxi driver who offered to drive him to the capital city, Tripoli, for free. Instead, he was sold to a “white Libyan,” or Arab, for $200. He was forced to work off his “debt” on a construction site, a pattern that repeated each time he was sold and resold. “If you work hard, you get bread,” he tells TIME from the darkened room of an abandoned hotel in Benin City that the Nigerian government is using to house human trafficking victims rescued from Libya. “If you refuse to work, you are beaten. If you run away and get caught …” His voice trails off. The scar on his face says the rest.
https://time.com/5550333/african-slave-trade/

Yorubastardz:
2 US ships dey chili inside around the strait for 2 weeks and Iran never touch them

Na those harmless ships wey dey pass
Iran go begin bark like Ekuke

LeeSmart:
Make God1000 come defend him comrades oo😂😂

Nextjs:
By the time US are through with iran their situation will be worst than Yemen.


The blockade means they can't sell oil, gas etc

fuckingAyaya:
Maduro and other Venezuela's top military commanders are alive.

89green:
Iran is wicked. I never knew there was a quiet country somewhere that can treat US fxck up

Righteousness2:
Even though this is likely a FAKE photos,
If I was there, I would PERSONALLY destroy that toy/ graven Image.

Who the hell told you that is JESUS CHRIST?
You mould a graven Image and call it JESUS? That's Abomination.
That is False and should be DESTROYED.

DID JESUS ASK YOU TO MOULD ANY statue of his?
The ALMIGHTY GOD HIMSELF COMMANDED That no image of anything of such should be followed.

We live in a Generation that has no time for the Word of GOD, the Bible.
We live in a Generation that are carried away with all manner of Fables.
When you Don't Know GOD , you Don't know his word the BIBLE, then you are Finished in life.

You will be Swept away with ALL Manners of Deceptions and Delusions which will guarantee you DESRUCTION.

HacheNoire:
“If Hezebollah did not destroy after all these decades, then Israel has a right to destroy it”

- Nigerian IDF’s

brain54:
Who ever said Nigeria was a poor country...?

EmekaBlue:
USA na baba... World rulers in good ways

Natidred:
That's why Jews think christians are cowards

Excellent93:
Iran wan prove strong head ..how market
Before Trump leaves office he should make sure no breeding ground for terrorism and terrorist sympathizers so the world would be a better place

SpecialAdviser:
No measure is better than breakup.
Most Nigerians are so daft to realize it.

Even the north will be better after breakup.

God bless MNK both now and forever

buygala:
Ipob is funding Jihad?

Are you sure all is ok upstairs?

Irony1:
Where is the proof that the group funds terrorism. Of they are really doing terrorism financing. There should be a trail from Abroad. For BH even UAE sent details on financiers to the govt. Where is such for IPOB? All these from Nigerian army on steiking ESN is just to deflect attention from the blunder in the north.

DLifeless1:
IPOB don't study and pray with the quran, what are you talking about?

buygala:
Ipob is funding terrorism in the North by arming those terrorists with MRAPS, drones, anti-tank missiles, etc while the IPOB themselves are roaming the east with Sienna buses and local ammunition?

So Ipob can't afford MRAP for itself but can acquire it for ISIS, ISWAP and co?

I understand you hate the East...but say something else

buygala:
Good one

Na Ipob dey slaughter Brigadier Generals and Colonels en-masse innit

One wound think the army will presently be more focused on avenging its fallen senior officers who have lost their lives in rather very embarrassing circumstances

I am a Patriot to the core who has always been supporting our armed forces..but isn't it time that someone tells these Army people that their Python is dancing in the wrong place?

Gallant officer go dance python finish for Imo only for ISWAP to later dance python on him in Borno

TONYE001:
Obliterated, how?

The war ship turned around? You saw it turn?

Well, propagandas are crucial aspects of wars. All the parties involved in this war fo this.

Horus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsV5_Z5jI0c

Moment US Warship Forced To Turn Away From Hormuz By Iran's Military Warning

"Last Warning"!!. Iranian state media released footage showing IRGC forces warning a U.S. Navy destroyer to change course or face attack.
The dramatic radio exchange suggests a high-risk naval standoff

saddler:
lets see how your terrorist regime will convince ships that wants to buy iranian oil to go through US blockade.

saddler:
Somebody shout power. Lets see how the terrorists regim will extort the world using international shipping waters

fineboynl:
which off guard? Someone they claim they told to run to bunker but he chooses to die in is office?

There was already war they emilinated some IRGC. It was the next day they wipe him. Even inside that bunker they already destroyed it.

fineboynl:
When Donald Trump said he stopped an Israeli plan to assassinate Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Many of the pro Iranian and urchin insulted him claiming he can't do anything.

When they finally assassinated him. The same urchin cry for revenge and promise brimstone.

But th Israeli destroyed all their weapons and launchers.

This current islamic regime once they hear of Israel matter they will run away. They are not longer and existential threat to Israel. Israel win in this war.

donleo92:
The ceasefire should be in the Americans own terms

And it must suit America

Iran army don't have a bargaining chip apart from propaganda and Isha Allah

This terrorist love violence, and can only surrender when, when they see stronger violence

lordprogress:
it smells like western propaganda.

Ibtxxo:
I gave a woman 500k to start a business for me on agreement she will be paying me weekly.
This girl ate the money within one month.
Can u imagine she finish 500k under one month.
It is hard to see girl who value money