Citation(s) from the GunPolicy.org literature library
Florquin, Nicolas, Sigrid Lipott, and Francis Wairagu. 2019 ‘Excerpts on Trafficking - Mali.’ Weapons Compass: Mapping Illicit Small Arms Flows in Africa, pp. 42-59. Geneva: Small Arms Survey, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. 1 January
Relevant contents
While local actors who are involved in ant trafficking in firearms tend do so as a sideline to their main activity of smuggling legal commodities, in some cases, in order to maintain a low profile, criminal syndicates outsource the transport of weapons and drugs to local actors. In the Sahara–Sahel, conflict in Mali and Libya and the subsequent proliferation of armed groups in border areas led to the militarization and increased criminalization of traditional trading routes, which fell under the control of powerful armed actors. Participants in the present study noted that the general population, including migrants and refugees, are sometimes used as 'mules' to transport weapons. For instance, Uganda noted the involvement of women in such trafficking, while in the Central African Republic in 2014 a woman accompanied by her child attempted to smuggle shotgun ammunition from Cameroon in a bag of onions; the ammunition was intended for anti-Balaka militia. (p.42)
In Chad and Niger sizeable convoys of combatants and weapons were regularly intercepted between 2011 and 2013 transiting to other countries such as Mali and Sudan. Among the looted materiel, hundreds—if not thousands—of man-portable air defence systems capable of downing commercial airliners escaped from state control, with many subsequently being retrieved in Libya and several others in Mali, Tunisia, Lebanon, and possibly as far as the Central African Republic. (p. 50)
…weapons originating from Ivorian stockpiles have been recovered in a range of countries in the Sahel, and possibly as far as the Central African Republic, while weapons originating from Malian stockpiles have also found their way elsewhere in the Sahel. Ghana reported a case related to the 14 December 2015 seizure of a cache of firearms and ammunition in Kumasi, which included 21 weapons (including 11 AK-pattern rifles) and 9,450 rounds of ammunition of various calibres. Five of the AK-pattern rifles had ECOWAS markings on them that enabled the Ghanaian authorities to quickly determine that the weapons had been recently diverted from Côte d'Ivoire, which the Ivorian authorities confirmed in response to a tracing procedure. (p. 51)