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“You can’t do this job without a gun. You have to carry a gun,” the man opposite me calmly explains.

“When there is disagreement, they come to you at night and empty two bullets in you and then disappear.”

The high-risk job he’s describing isn’t in the military or the police – he is a people smuggler.

Last year, he made more than £800,000 selling migrants spots in dinghies taking them from France to the UK.

He’s agreed to tell me more about the shadowy industry on the condition that we disguise his identity.

“My job is to send people from Dunkirk to Britain. From April till November, the workload is very good and the demand for Britain is high,” Taha says.

“I launched 12 dinghies last year and each dinghy had 50 or 45 migrants in them. Each person £1,500 so, thank God, I earned good money.”

Watch special programme on migration crisis with Yalda Hakim on Sky News from 9pm tonight

People smuggling piece by Siobhan Robbins, Europe correspondent. Uploaded 17 June 2024

A huge map of Europe is rolled out on the table in front of us.

This is his marketplace, the area where he drums up trade.

Business is booming, more than 11,000 people have paid smugglers like Taha to cross the Channel to the UK so far this year, often packing into rickety dinghies with too few life jackets.

“How do you get your boats to France?” I ask.

“Turkey to Austria and to Germany and then from Germany to France,” he says, pointing at the route on the map.

Taha is a cog in a much larger smuggling network.

He says other people oversee logistics, sending dinghies from Turkey to Germany and storing them in warehouses to be distributed to the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.

Taha’s business is focused on the crossing itself and begins when the migrants get to France.

Read more of Sky News’ coverage on the migration crisis:
On the ‘Train of Death’: Electric shocks, beatings and brandings
Poll reveals what people really think about immigration

He says they usually arrive in Dunkirk with the help of friends or relatives.

Their crossing fee is deposited with a kind of smugglers’ travel agent.

Once they arrive safely in Britain, the money is released to agents like Taha.

But the cash isn’t guaranteed.

The boats cost 13,000 to 14,000 euros, so if one sinks or is slashed by French police then he takes the financial hit.

He’s also responsible for the people on board.

More than 250 have disappeared crossing the Channel since 2014, according to figures from the International Organization for Migration.

A seven-year-old girl is among those who have drowned this year.

People smuggling piece by Siobhan Robbins, Europe correspondent. Uploaded 17 June 2024
Image:
Taha tells Siobhan Robbins ‘we can’t pressure people’

‘If we pressure people, we are killers’

Taha doesn’t pretend the route is safe.

“I have not had anyone dying on my watch but there were a few dinghies that capsized, and some migrants drowned. This passage is a dangerous journey,” he says.

Numerous governments, including the UK, have blamed smugglers for the deaths.

“The British government says that the smugglers are killing people… [but] we see ourselves as rescuers and not killers because the people go of their own volition, and we can’t pressure people.

“If we pressure people to go, then we are killers,” he says.

“There are dangers for us too.”

Read more:
Hunting a people smuggling kingpin
See what the UK’s political parties say about migration

People smuggling piece by Siobhan Robbins, Europe correspondent. Uploaded 17 June 2024

‘They use knives and AK47s’

Violence is expected when you work in organised crime but turf wars over the lucrative crossings has made the situation more dangerous.

“There are quarrels between the smugglers over passengers, and this descends into fights with someone getting wounded and another killed,” Taha says.

“They use pistols, knives and AK47s.”

“Has anyone come for you?” I ask.

“For sure, a hundred times. They came and fired at us, and we fired back.

“People from our side were wounded and from their side were wounded too and the police arrived and that was when the fighting ended,” he says.

“[They’d been] fighting with Kalashnikovs, M4s, pistols and all other guns.”

“Is this job going to kill you in the end?” I ask.

“For sure. I have made peace with that,” he replies.

Calmly, he agrees his job is “a death sentence” and it’s just a matter of time before he gets a bullet in the head.

Despite the risk, after years working his way up, he refuses to walk away.

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“I can’t give up on this job because that is what I know. I want to give up but can’t stay away from this work,” he says.

So, while the police and politicians try to stop people boarding the boats, smugglers like Taha work on staying one step ahead – promising to find new routes if old ones are closed, willing to risk their lives for a stake in this multi-billion-pound trade.

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The staff crossing gang lines to battle malnutrition and cholera in Haiti capital

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The staff crossing gang lines to battle malnutrition and cholera in Haiti capital

In a simple breezeblock and cement building, cholera patients are attached to drips as they lie sprawled on hard, wooden beds.

In one section, two young boys stare into the distance through listless eyes. They are very poorly, the staff tell us, but now they are here, they will survive.

Two boys at the Fontaine Hospital in Haiti.
Image:
Two boys at the Fontaine Hospital

Medical staff check on their patients in the relatively cool interior of the wards, while outside the sun beats down on the grounds of the rough and ready interconnected buildings of the Fontaine Hospital in Port-au-Prince.

The hospital is built amid the slums in an area of Haiti’s capital known as Cite Soleil – or Sun City.

A malnourished child at the Fontaine Hospital.
Image:
‘All the infants are malnourished’ at the Fontaine Hospital, writes Sky’s Stuart Ramsay

This suburb is widely regarded to be the birthplace of the gangs of Port-au-Prince, and this section of the city has been violent and dangerous for decades.

Civil society doesn’t function here. Indeed, the Fontaine Hospital is the only medical facility still operating in the gang-controlled areas of Cite Soleil.

Without it, the people who live here would have no access to doctors or medical care.

How did gangs take over Haiti? Watch Q&A with Stuart Ramsay

I’m standing in the cholera ward with Jose Ulysse, the hospital’s founder. He opened the hospital 32 years ago. It’s a charity, run purely on donations.

Mr Ulysse explained that the increasing gang violence across the whole of Port-au-Prince, and the chaos it is causing, means people are herded into displacement camps, which in turn means that cholera outbreaks are getting worse.

Jose Ulysse, Fontaine Hospital founder.
Image:
Jose Ulysse, Fontaine Hospital founder

“Cholera is always present, but there’s a time when it’s more,” he told me.

“Lately because of all the displacement camps there is a great deal of promiscuity and rape, and we have an increase in cases.”

As we spoke, I asked him about the two young boys, and a small group of women on drips in the ward.

“Now they are here, they will be okay, but if they weren’t here and this hospital wasn’t here, they would be dead by now,” he replied when I asked him about their condition.

Jose Ulysse and Stuart Ramsay.
Image:
Jose Ulysse and Sky’s Stuart Ramsay

We left the cholera ward, cleaning our hands and shoes with disinfectant, before moving on to the next part of the hospital under pressure – the malnutrition ward.

“Malnutrition and cholera go hand-in-hand,” Mr Ulysse explained as we walked.

In the clinic, we meet parents and their little ones – all the infants are malnourished.

The mothers – and important to note – one father, are given food to feed their babies.

Read more of Stuart Ramsey’s reporting in Haiti:
Children going to school in Haiti dodge gunfire
Listen: Reporting from Haiti’s urban war zone
Soldiers face ‘raining bullets’ from Haiti’s gangs

A malnourished child at the Fontaine Hospital.
Image:
Distended tummies are ‘giveaway signs’ of malnutrition

Those who are in the worst condition are also fed by a drip. One of the giveaway signs of malnutrition is a distended tummy, and most of these babies have that.

Poverty and insecurity combine to cause this, Mr Ulysse tells me. And like cholera, malnutrition is getting worse.

He explained that when the violence increases, parents can’t go to work because it is too dangerous, so they end up not being able to make a living, which means that they can’t feed their children properly.

The medics and hospital workers risk their lives every day, crossing gang lines and territories to get to the hospital and care for their patients.

Mothers and children at the Fontaine Hospital in Haiti.
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Mothers and their children at the Fontaine Hospital in gang-controlled Cite Soleil

NICU Unit at Fontaine Hospital.
Image:
NICU unit at Fontaine Hospital

The reason why this hospital is so popular is because staff show up, even when the fighting is at its worst.

Despite their meagre resources, the Fontaine Hospital’s intensive care unit for premature babies is busy – it is widely regarded as one of the best facilities of its kind in the country.

A team of nurses, masked and in scrubs, tenderly care for these tiny children, some of whom are only hours old.

They are some of the most incredibly vulnerable.

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I asked Mr Ulysse what would happen if his hospital wasn’t there.

“Just imagine, there isn’t a place where they can go, everyone comes here, normally the poorest people in the country”, he told me.

But he stressed that the only way the hospital can keep going is through donations, and the cuts to the US government’s USAID programme has had a direct impact on the hospital’s donors.

A young boy at the Fontaine Hospital.
Image:
The hospital is run by donations, which have been affected by cuts from the US government’s USAID programme

Attacks on hospitals and staff working in the toughest areas across Port-au-Prince have become common.

We filmed outside one of the two Médecins Sans Frontières facilities in the centre of the capital, where work has been suspended because their staff were threatened or attacked.

Medical personnel from the health ministry in Port-au-Prince tell us over 70 per cent of all medical facilities in Port-au-Prince have been shut. Only one major public hospital, the Le Paix Hospital, is open.

Haiti - gang controlled - map
Haiti map

The Le Paix Hospital’s executive director, Dr Paul Junior Fontilus, says he is perplexed by the gang’s targeting of medical facilities.

“It makes no sense, it’s crazy, we don’t know what it is they want,” he said as we walked through the hospital.

The hospital is orderly and functioning well, considering the pressure it is under. They are dealing with more and more cases of cholera, an increase in gunshot wounds and sexual violence.

“We are overrun with demand, and this surpasses our capacity to respond,” he explained to me.

“But we are obliged to meet the challenge and offer services to the population.”

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Haiti: An eyewitness account

Gang violence is crushing the life out of Port-au-Prince, affecting all of society. And, as is often the case, the most vulnerable in society suffer the most.

Stuart Ramsay reports from Haiti with camera operator Toby Nash, senior foreign producer Dominique Van Heerden, and producers Brunelie Joseph and David Montgomery.

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Donald Trump ambushes South African president at White House meeting by playing video alleging ‘genocide’

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Donald Trump ambushes South African president at White House meeting by playing video alleging 'genocide'

Donald Trump has ambushed South Africa’s president during a White House meeting by playing a video purportedly showing evidence of a “genocide” of white farmers in the African country.

The US president, who was hosting leader Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office, said the footage showed the graves of more than a thousand white farmers and “it’s a terrible sight… I’ve never seen anything like it. Those people are all killed”.

After an initial friendly chat where Mr Trump complimented South African golfers in the room, a montage of clips was played as Mr Ramaphosa sat quietly and mostly expressionless. He later said: “I’d like to know where that is because this [the alleged burial site in the video] I’ve never seen”.

Donald Trump meets Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office. Pic: AP
Image:
Donald Trump meets Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office. Pic: AP

The lights were dimmed in the Oval Office as the videos were shown, including of South African officials allegedly calling for violence against white farmers.

The scene in the heart of the White House administration was reminiscent of Mr Trump’s ambush of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February.

But later, as he left after around three hours at the White House, Mr Ramaphosa insisted his meeting with Mr Trump went “very well”.

The White House’s official account on X posted the footage that was shown in the Oval Office, saying it was “proof of persecution in South Africa”.

South Africa has rejected the allegation that white people are disproportionately targeted by crime.

The clips included one of a communist politician playing a controversial anti-apartheid song that includes lyrics about killing a farmer.

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Mr Trump accused South Africa of failing to address the killing of white farmers.

“We have many people that feel they’re being persecuted, and they’re coming to the United States. So we take from many… locations, if we feel there’s persecution or genocide going on,” the US president said, referring specifically to white farmers.

He added: “People are fleeing South Africa for their own safety. Their land is being confiscated and in many cases they’re being killed.”

Alluding to people in the videos, Mr Trump said: “These are people that are officials and they’re saying… kill the white farmer and take their land.”

The US president then displayed printed copies of news articles that he said showed white South Africans who had been killed, saying “death, death” as he flipped through them.

He added of one article: “Here’s burial sites all over the place, these are all white farmers that are being buried.”

President Trump and President Ramaphosa look towards a screen where videos were played. Pic: Reuters
Image:
Mr Trump and Mr Ramaphosa look towards a screen where videos were played. Pic: Reuters

South African leader rejects allegations

Mr Ramaphosa pushed back against Mr Trump’s accusations, by responding: “What you saw, the speeches that were being made, that is not government policy. We have a multi-party democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves, political parties to adhere to various policies.

“And in many cases, or in some cases, those policies do not go along with government policy.

“Our government policy is completely, completely against what he [a person in the video montage] was saying, even in the parliament. And they are a small minority party which is allowed to exist in terms of our constitution.”

Read more from Sky News:
Ex-Ukrainian politician living abroad shot dead on school run
The soldiers faced with ‘raining bullets’ from violent gangs

An uncomfortable meeting where facts were dismissed as a difference in opinion

The screens, the visuals and President Trump’s foreshadowing mentions of a “bloodbath” all point to one thing – this ambush was planned.

As the yells of anguish and violent rhetoric echoed in the Oval Office, President Ramaphosa craned his neck with a stern expression to watch the “evidence” of a repeatedly disproven “white genocide” in his country.

He interjected only to question the location of the videos – to which Mr Trump replied, almost with a “duh” tone of voice, “South Africa” – and then pushed on to direct his team to verify them.

That was the singular point of outright defiance from South Africa’s leader in an uncomfortable meeting where facts were dismissed as a difference in opinion and outdated videos were played as breaking news.

For the rest of the meeting, Nelson Mandela’s former chief negotiator kept calm and played the charm offensive – appealing to Mr Trump’s ego at every sharp turn while maintaining that black South Africans are disproportionately impacted by the country’s harrowing murder rate.

The charm and calm may seem like dull knives in this sword fight but are necessary for peacekeeping in a meeting where £6bn in trade hangs in the balance.

South Africa has the most to lose in the deteriorating bilateral relations.

In just five months, the Trump administration has cut off vital humanitarian aid, including HIV assistance of which South Africa is the biggest beneficiary; expelled South Africa’s ambassador; and offered white South Africans refugee status as millions of black Africans suffer across the continent.

The potential futility of Mr Ramaphosa’s strategy came into vision as cameras panned to the back of the Oval Office at the end of the meeting to show a stony-faced Elon Musk.

The false claims of white genocide Musk has championed on X are now a powder keg in US-South African relations, as he works to get Starlink licensed in his home country. A business strategy that even South Africa’s iconic negotiator may not be able to contend with.

Mr Ramaphosa also said of the behaviour alleged by Mr Trump: “We are completely opposed to that.”

The South African leader said there was crime in his country, and the majority of victims were black. Mr Trump cut him off and said: “The farmers are not black.” The South African president responded: “These are concerns we are willing to talk to you about.”

A video was played during the White House meeting. Pic: AP
Image:
A video was played during the White House meeting. Pic: AP

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Mr Trump has cancelled aid, expelled South Africa’s ambassador and offered refuge to white minority Afrikaners based on racial discrimination claims which Pretoria says are baseless.

Experts in South Africa have said there is no evidence of white people being targeted, although farmers of all races are victims of violent home invasions in a country that suffers from a very high crime rate.

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Putin visits Kursk region for first time since Ukrainian troops ejected

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Putin visits Kursk region for first time since Ukrainian troops ejected

Vladimir Putin has visited Kursk for the first time since his troops ejected Ukrainian forces from the Russian city.

The Russian president met with volunteer organisations and visited a nuclear power plant in the region on Tuesday, the Kremlin said.

Mr Putin said late last month that his forces had ejected Ukrainian troops from the Kursk region, which ended the largest incursion into Russian territory since the Second World War.

Pic: Kremlin News/Telegram
Image:
Vladimir Putin during his visit in the Kursk region on Tuesday. Pic: Kremlin News/Telegram

Vladimir Putin visits the under construction Kursk-II nuclear power plant  in the Kursk Region, Russia.
Pic: Kremlin.ru/Reuters
Image:
Mr Putin visited a nuclear power plant. Pic: Kremlin.ru/Reuters

Ukraine launched its attack in August last year, using swarms of drones and heavy Western weaponry to smash through the Russian border, controlling nearly 540sq m (5,813sq ft) of Kursk at the height of the incursion.

More than 159 Ukrainian drones were shot down over Russian territory, Russia’s defence ministry said on Wednesday.

The majority were over Russia’s western regions, but at least six drones were shot down over the densely populated Moscow region, the ministry added.

An up-to-date map showing the Russian and Ukrainian gains
An up-to-date map showing the Russian and Ukrainian territorial gains

The visit in the Kursk region comes as a Russian missile attack killed six soldiers and injured 10 more during training in the Sumy region of Ukraine, according to the country’s national guard.

The commander of the unit has been suspended and an internal investigation has been launched.

Pic: Kremlin News/Telegram
Image:
The Russian president met with volunteer organisations. Pic: Kremlin News/Telegram

Russia’s defence ministry claimed the attack on the training camp in northeastern Ukraine killed up to 70 Ukrainian servicemen, including 20 instructors.

The attack comes after US President Donald Trump spoke to both Mr Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, urging them to restart ceasefire talks.

Read more from Sky News:
Fresh UK and EU sanctions on Russia announced

British doctor in Gaza describes horror

But German defence minister Boris Pistorius said on Wednesday that Mr Trump misjudged his influence on Mr Putin after the call between the American and Russian leaders yielded no progress in Ukraine peace talks.

Europe has since announced new sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine. Mr Pistorius said it remained to be seen whether the US would join those measures.

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