Migrants' African Routes - Agadez - Arlit - Bamako - Gao - Tamanrasset

Tamanrasset

From 2000 onwards has been traced a new much more westward oriented route, which gathers the migratory stream moving from Sub-Saharan Africa, which is mostly exposed to conflicts and crisis (such as Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Central African Republic, Cameroon, etc.) as well as the smaller migratory stream coming from Central Asia.

So, nowadays migrants rediscover and go through the old routes of Sub-Saharan caravan networks covered for centuries by nomadic people (Tuareg) from Mali, Niger and Algeria.

The new joints passed through by caravans reshape the urban landscape and many cities, like Agadez and Arlit in Niger, Bamako and Gao in Mali and Tamanrasset in Algeria, are filled with migrants and other people involved in the handling and transporting illegal migrants.

From these junts migrants head especially towards Maghnia on the Moroccan border and the Spanish enclave in Ceuta and Melilla on the coast, where they continuously try to cross the barriers in defence of the cities or to reach the nearest spots on the Algerian and Tunisian coasts. Between 2000 and 2005 the migratory pressure in Morocco has increased and reached its highest point in summer-autumn 2005, when hundreds of migrants assaulted the barriers of the two Spanish enclaves (Ceuta and Melilla), causing the death of dozens of people and the injure of hundreds of people.

The renewed policy of cooperation between Madrid and Rabat, launched by Government Zapatero in 2004, prompts Moroccan authorities to adopt measures to dissuade and restrain irregular migration, causing a new southward movement of the migratory routes toward the Canary Islands.