Violence, rape, thirst, even organ theft: migrants in danger of death in Africa

If not allowed to die of dehydration or disease, migrants taking dangerous land routes across North Africa toward the Mediterranean and Europe risk rape, torture, sex trafficking and even organ theft, according to a new report produced in part by the United Nations.

Migrant deaths in the Mediterranean have attracted global attention over the past decade, but “the number dying in the desert could well be at least double that,” said the report, released Friday by two United Nations agencies and the Mixed Migration Centre, a nongovernmental research group based in Denmark.

Drawing on interviews with more than 31,000 migrants throughout their journeys from 2020 to 2023, the report documents the brutality faced by the growing number of people from dozens of countries attempting to cross the Sahel and Sahara, fleeing war, environmental degradation and poverty.

In addition to sexual violence, which is counted separately in the report, physical violence is the risk most often cited by migrants. Dangers along the routes include arbitrary detention – often to extort money from their families – and trafficking for labor, sexual exploitation or criminal activities. Migrants reported being tortured and even having their organs harvested.

The violence is often carried out by organized criminal gangs and militias, particularly by traffickers paid to ferry migrants to Europe. Traffickers regularly lie to migrants about the dangers they will face, demand more money once they are away from home, and provide them with little food, water and other supplies along the way.

“I thought all accidents happened at sea,” Teklebrhan Tefamariam Tekle, an Eritrean refugee currently in Sweden, told a reporter. “The accidents happen there, in the Sahara. There are lots of Eritrean bodies. There are bones and skulls of dead people.”

Others said migrants and traffickers abandoned those who collapsed from thirst or injuries along the way. “You just have to keep going,” said one man, identified as Abraham. “You never look back.”

About a third of the adults surveyed were women, who face particular dangers. According to a 2020 United Nations study, about 90% of women and girls who traveled along the Mediterranean route were raped, and some were forced into prostitution to pay for their journey. There are reports of women being forced to marry captors and give birth to their children, and others having to pay for sexual favors to be able to safely cross a group.

“These stories are truly horrific,” said Judith Sunderland, who was not involved in writing the report but who, as deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division, interviewed hundreds of people who survived the journey to Europe. The stories in the report, she said, are tragically similar to those she has heard.

“You can’t believe that people can be so cruel to each other,” she added. “You can’t understand how people continue to undertake these journeys, when many of them know the risks.”

Migrants identified Libya, Algeria and Ethiopia as the most dangerous countries.

According to the U.N. refugee agency, one of the sponsors of the new report, more than 72,400 migrants crossed the Mediterranean in 2024 alone, and at least 785 died or went missing. But while it’s hard to track sea crossings, it’s even harder, the report’s authors say, to estimate how many people are trying to reach northern Africa’s shores after crossing remote, sparsely populated and often lawless stretches of desert — and how many are disappearing along the way.

Between January 2020 and May 2024, 1,180 people are estimated to have died crossing the Sahara, but the actual number is likely much higher, the report said.

European countries have long tried, to varying degrees, to deter migrants, paying North African countries to prevent migrants from crossing the sea. A recent investigation by a media consortium found that in some cases, European governments are funding the training and equipment of North African security forces who force migrants off the coast and back into the desert without supplies, putting their lives at risk.

Many of the countries migrants are trying to pass through are torn apart by armed conflict and extreme poverty, or have weak central governments.

The combination of instability and hostility means migrants in Africa are unlikely to find recourse to authorities or treatment for physical or emotional trauma, said the report, also sponsored by the United Nations International Organization for Migration.

The report, which updates and expands on a report published in 2020, says that since then, “the security situation has further deteriorated in several countries, generating an increase in displacement and cross-border movements of people in need of international protection and migrants.”