On 19 June, Al Jazeera published a report by Simon Speakman Cordall titled ‘Smuggler paradise on Tunisia-Libya border hurts as closure strangles trade’. The report looks at how the closure of the Ras Ajdir border crossing between Tunisia and Libya has affected local Amazigh tribes whose livelihoods depended on the smuggling route. Cordall explains that for the Amazigh, who had been suppressed ‘brutally’ for decades, control of the crossing is ‘about safeguarding their future and that of their people as it is political influence’.
Read the full report here.