Libya no longer functions as a transit space between Africa and Europe. It has become an endpoint. For tens of thousands of migrants and refugees every year, Libya is where journeys stall, bodies accumulate, and survival becomes a matter of rough ransom calculations. What has emerged goes beyond muted abuse along migration routes, but a system that profits from captivity and, increasingly, from death itself. The discovery in early 2025 of mass graves near Jikharra and Kufra, holding at least 93 mutilated migrant bodies, did not reveal a hidden crime. It merely confirmed what survivors, aid workers, and residents have long known: Libya now contains killing fields linked directly to the management of migration.
European policymakers often speak of “irregular flows” and “external borders” — language that sanitizes the reality south of the Mediterranean. Libya sits at the center of Europe’s containment strategy. Since 2017, European funding, training, and equipment have turned Libyan armed groups into gatekeepers. Interceptions at sea have increased sharply. Between 2017 and 2024, Libyan forces intercepted and returned more than 130,000 people attempting to cross the central Mediterranean. Each interception represents not rescue, but forced return to detention, extortion, or disappearance.
The moral hazard is structural. Europe pays to stop movement, not to protect lives. Libyan actors, fragmented and competitive, respond rationally. Migrants become commodities whose value can be extracted repeatedly. Detention generates ransoms. Ransoms generate liquidity. Liquidity sustains militias. When ransom fails, elimination becomes cheaper than care. Killing fields emerge, disguised as chaos alone, but driven by incentives.
Libya’s detention economy operates across three layers. Official centers nominally fall under state bodies, most prominently the Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration. Parallel to these are semi-official facilities run by militias integrated into ministries in name only. Beyond both lies a shadow network of clandestine prisons in warehouses, farms, factories, desert compounds, and abandoned zoos. Movement between these layers is fluid. A migrant intercepted at sea may pass through all three, sold and resold along the way.
Survivor testimonies paint a consistent, horrifying picture. Men are tortured on video to extract payments from families thousands of miles away. Women are systematically abused, often until pregnancy, then subjected to forced abortions or lethal violence. Children are beaten into forced labor or trained as guards. Tuberculosis, scabies, and malnutrition spread unchecked. Death rates inside detention remain unknowable, yet estimates by humanitarian workers suggest that in some facilities one in 10 detainees does not survive prolonged captivity.
The mass graves near Kufra are especially revealing. Kufra sits deep in Libya’s southeast, a hub where routes from Sudan, Chad, and Eritrea converge. Control there has shifted among armed groups tied to trafficking networks that span the Sahel and Horn of Africa. Bodies discovered bound, burned, or shot indicate execution, not neglect. Killing in such contexts serves multiple purposes: terrorizing captives, eliminating those unable to pay, and signaling dominance to rival groups. Death becomes governance.
Push factors feeding this system are intensifying, not easing. Climate stress across the Sahel has cut agricultural yields by as much as 30 percent in some regions over the past decade. Lake Chad has lost roughly 90 percent of its surface area since the 1960s, hollowing out livelihoods. Violence, unleashed by extremists, across Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and northern Nigeria has displaced more than 6 million people.
Sudan’s civil war has produced over 8 million internally displaced and driven hundreds of thousands toward Libya’s eastern and southern corridors. Governance collapse and security vacuums from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa ensures that Libya’s supply of human cargo will not dry up.
Survivor testimonies paint a horrifying picture.
Hafed Al-Ghwell
European policy has failed to account for this reality. Containment assumes elasticity: Stop boats, reduce arrivals, claim success. Numbers briefly fell after 2017, yet lethality rose. Smugglers responded by launching fewer, but more overcrowded, vessels. Shipwreck rates increased. Mortality in the central Mediterranean climbed. Meanwhile, Libya absorbed the human fallout. By 2024, an estimated 700,000 migrants were present in Libya at any given time, many cycling repeatedly through detention.
The thing is, complicity does not require malicious intent. It arises when policymakers accept predictable consequences. European auditors have already acknowledged that vehicles and equipment supplied for border control were used in migrant roundups feeding detention networks. Funding continued regardless. Diplomatic engagement with Libyan power brokers intensified, including with eastern authorities whose territorial control rests on coercion. Stability was quickly redefined around containment, granting legitimacy to the illegitimate as long as the boats stopped arriving.
Libya’s internal political division compounds the problem. Western authorities in Tripoli lack monopoly over force. Rogue eastern authorities project order through repression. Southern regions operate as frontier markets where tribal alliances, traffickers, and armed groups converge. Migrants traverse all three zones. Each extracts value. No actor bears responsibility for protection. Accountability dissolves across jurisdictional seams.
The killing fields become the inevitable final stage of a system designed to exhaust. Torture extracts payment. Forced labor extracts value. Gender-based violence enforces control. Killing removes costs. Bodies buried in desert sands represent woeful economic decisions as much as moral failures. A migrant unable to pay $5,000 to $10,000 in ransom loses market value, thus execution becomes “efficient.”
Yet the system contains vulnerabilities. It depends on secrecy, financial flows, and political cover. Exposure has already altered behavior in some areas, pushing detention further underground. Financial tracking of ransom networks remains limited but feasible. Diplomatic pressure has rarely targeted individual commanders despite ample evidence. Moreover, sanction regimes remain underused.
Cautious optimism rests on realism.
Migration cannot be solved at sea or outsourced to fractured states. Any strategy premised on deterrence alone will generate violence where oversight is weakest. Alternatives exist. Legal pathways, labor mobility agreements, and humanitarian visas reduce reliance on smugglers. Investment in protection along routes matters more than patrol boats. Accountability mechanisms tied to funding can also significantly alter incentives. None of these offer quick fixes, however. They require, however, a level of political courage not seen in recent years.
To conclude, Libya’s killing fields confront Europe with a very uncomfortable reality. Border control has been achieved not by order, but by terror displaced southward. The added distance has allowed denial. However, unearthing mutilated remains from mass graves quickly collapses that distance. The question now is not whether Europe knew and how much. What Brussels’ army of suits must confront is how long they will accept a system where the price of deterrence is paid in unmarked graves under the Libyan sun.
- Hafed Al-Ghwell is senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center in Washington and senior fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies. X: @HafedAlGhwell
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source https://www.arabnews.com/node/2628914
Categories: Africa, Immigration, Libya, migrants, North Africa, refugees