Brothers Faisal* and Ali*, 15 and 16 respectively, had only one dream: to step foot in Italy. They had seen videos shared by friends and others in their area who had successfully made it to Europe and were living a much better life.

The brothers knew that in their hometown, Faisalabad, and the villages around it, the biggest houses belonged to those who had one or more family members working abroad.

They convinced their elder brother Salman* to pay the money — an initial payment of around Rs2 million each — to an agent who had helped others get to Europe.

“The remaining 1.5 million rupees for each of the two passengers had to be paid when they were ready to take the boat from Tripoli to Italy,” says 28-year-old Salman while speaking to Eos in a phone interview. “We had to sell a piece of land to finance their trip,” he adds.

Despite a spate of tragedies involving informal migrants, young men from Pakistan and elsewhere continue to make the dangerous trips — via a mixture of land, air and sea routes — to get to Europe, with seemingly no way to stop this ‘forced’ exodus…

The brothers had their passports back within a week from the agent, stamped with an umrah [religious pilgrimage] visa to Saudi Arabia, and left in November last year. From there, they flew to Egypt, and then travelled in a bus to the Libyan capital Tripoli, from where they had to take a boat through the Mediterranean to the south of Italy.

During this time, several major incidents involving migrant ships were reported. It included the capsizing of a ship in January this year, which claimed at least 50 lives — including 44 Pakistanis — who were trying to get to Spain through the Atlantic Ocean from Mauritania, in Africa’s northwest.

THE LIBYAN CONNECTION

But not all such accidents are reported, says one official of the anti-human trafficking and smuggling wing of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), who has previously investigated the Greek boat tragedy of June 2023, in which around 700 people drowned. They included at least 300 Pakistanis.

“Every day, around 10-15 boats leave the shores of Libya alone – from Tobruk in the east to Tripoli in the west, with Italy their intended destination,” he tells Eos.

According to figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 190,000 migrants and refugees arrived in Europe in 2024, with more than 90 percent taking the perilous sea route.

This was despite 2023 being the deadliest year in the Mediterranean since 2016, with more than 3,100 deaths by drowning, according to the International Organisation for Migration.

A 2025 report, titled ‘Externalising Rescue Operations at Sea: The Migration Deal Between Italy and Libya’, states that between 2013 and 2020, 680,000 migrants reached Italian coasts and more than 17,000 died while attempting to cross.

Following the Greek boat tragedy, Frontex, the European border agency, said that, in the first five months of 2023, the number of detected crossings had more than doubled compared to the same period in 2022 — to 50,318 — the highest number recorded since 2017.

It has resulted in riches for those controlling parts of war-torn Libya, with a 2021 report by the United Nations’ Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute stating that the annual income from smuggling migrants in Libya was between USD 89 and 236 million, based on the number of migrants that reached Italy.

The investigator in Pakistan explains that Libya has emerged as a new preferred destination for such undocumented migrants, with border controls having increased on land routes historically used for “dunki” — often used as a blanket term for all informal migrants, although it originally referred to those using donkeys when taking land routes from the border of Pakistan into Afghanistan and Iran, onwards to either Iraq, Turkey or Central Asia.

“The boats [used in Libya] are often small, wooden dinghies, carrying as few as 15-20 people, of which even the captain is a migrant trained during the stay in Libya,” says the investigator. “Others are bigger boats and when they get into an accident, it becomes global news.

“Our records show that, on average, 15,000 to 16,000 Pakistanis have travelled to Libya from Pakistan annually over the last three years,” he says. “An overwhelming number of those now travel to Libya to take the boat to Europe.”

The majority of trade is controlled by the Sanyara brothers of Gujrat, he continues. The Sanyaras have been involved in the business for around two decades and have a strong network of sub-agents in Pakistan, immigration officers in both Libya and Pakistan, human traffickers in Egypt and Turkey, as well as army officials in Libya, who control various territories, on their payroll.

The investigator adds that the land routes used by such migrants from Pakistan also remain porous, with estimates as high as “100,000 migrants from Pakistan entering Iran and Iraq” annually — sometimes on the pretext of “religious pilgrimage” — from where they try to head to Europe.

A CRACKDOWN TO NO AVAIL

The Greek boat tragedy resulted in the usual knee-jerk reaction from Pakistani politicians, with the FIA ordered to crack down on those involved in human trafficking. It resulted in action against officials posted at the immigration department at airports, including Karachi, Lahore, Faisalabad and Sialkot.

“Even if we crack down on one network or one route, a new sub-agent emerges with a new destination,” says the FIA investigator. “But the bigger problem is the people who want to go to Europe regardless of the cost. During one investigation, the father of a man missing in a boat accident wanted me to ask the under-interrogation agent when his second son could make the same trip,” he says in frustration.

A 2023 study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that 24,000 Pakistanis entered European Union (EU) countries illegally over the previous three years.

The numbers show that this exodus — primarily from northern Punjab’s belt around Gujrat, Gujranwala and Mandi Bahauddin but which now includes an increasing number of Pukhtoons and Kashmirs — continues. Between October 2023 and October 2024, Pakistani nationals lodged 28,000 asylum applications in the EU, according to the European Union Agency for Asylum.

Several investigators Eos spoke to said that the government crackdown on immigration officials, for their failure to stop such migrants from exiting the country, is only cosmetic and intended to appease criticism. “We can’t stop people with a legitimate visa,” they say.

Recently, though, the federal government has made a policy decision, whereby individuals from particular areas and districts have to be vetted if they are headed to particular destinations. “This includes people going to Saudi Arabia for umrah, too,” says the FIA official in Lahore.

They say that the number of passengers offloaded from flights since the issuance of the policy has gone up dramatically. In the first two months of this year, over 3,500 passengers have been offloaded at Lahore airport, the official revealed, much higher than the corresponding number of 1,293 during the same period last year. “This could sometimes include people travelling for legitimate reasons as well.”

THE SHORES OF EUROPE

In February, Salman got a call from the agent to transfer the remaining amount, so that his brothers could be put on the boat to Libya. Salman says he didn’t tell anyone at home so as not to worry them. “But I didn’t sleep for the next three days,” he adds.

A previous attempt at the crossing had seen his brothers arrested by Libyan police. “But the agent has an understanding with the police, with a set rate for each immigrant,” he adds. His brother spent two weeks in prison before his release, says Salman. Two days later, he received a call at night from one of his brothers that they were setting off in the boat.

The boats usually make a six to eight-hour journey, to make it to international waters. The boats, according to various migrants, then wait in international waters to be spotted by coastguards of either Italy or Greece, to be rescued and shifted to UN camps.

A day after the call from his brother, Salman got a call from the agent. “I had to muster up the courage to answer the phone, as I didn’t know what he would tell me.” To Salman’s relief and excitement, his two brothers had made it to Sicily, and were living at a UN camp.

“Now, they will live their dream, and probably help us achieve ours too,” says Salman.

**Names changed to protect privacy*

The writer is a staff member.
X: @hussainydada

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 2nd, 2025