Border security

Billion-euro Ottoman smuggling route to Europe still an operating business

It does sound anachronistic, but the routes of smuggling during the Ottoman period still persist today, as European Union’s law enforcement agency, Europol, estimates that smuggling into Europe was a business worth up to 5.7 billion euros in 2015.

According to Louise Shelley, founder and executive director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC), Bulgarian, Hungarian and Turkish criminal groups are often facilitators of illegal activities, moving individuals from east through the Balkans to Western Europe, following trajectories already established in the Ottoman era.

“Turkish drug trafficking organizations, building an historical smuggling routes, worked with criminal groups in the Balkans to move heroin to Europe” Shelley, who is also Professor at George Mason University, said in her speech at NATO Defense College Foundation conference “The Western Balkans at a crossroads” in Rome, Italy.