Italian Soldiers Deployed to Africa

Everyone knows about the British and French empires but few people remember the Italian Empire. Italy was always considered the least of the “Great Powers,” but it colonized Libya, Tunisia, Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. Now, the Italian Army is going back to Africa, this time, to a former French colony.

On December 18th, Italy’s Defense Minister, Roberta Pinotti, announced that Italian soldiers will soon be going to the West African nation of Niger. So far, the government has played up the angle that the Italian Army will combat Islamist terrorism. In 2016, terrorist attacks and abductions increased all across the Sahel region, which has many ill-guarded and ill-defined borders.

However, Defense Minister Pinotti also said that the Niger mission will disrupt human smuggling. While Sweden, Great Britain, France, and Germany get most of the news coverage about migrants, the foreign invasion may be even more acute in Italy, and Niger is a major hub of the cross-Sahara route. The landlocked country is an important transit point for the 600,000 Africans (most of them Nigerians — people from Niger are knows as Nigeriens) who have entered Europe. Many end up as pimps and prostitutes in Italy’s impoverished south.

People from Ghana, Liberia, and Burkina Faso also send migrants by the thousands to Italy, where they believe that they can gain asylum and work at menial jobs such as hairdresser or restaurant worker. All of this is winked at by Italy’s left-wing parties despite the fact that youth unemployment in Italy was 34 percent in October 2017.

As the forthcoming book Roadmap to Hell by Barbie Latza Nadeau makes clear, native-Italian criminal organizations have started working with both West African drug lords and Islamist gangs. Although one might expect the mafia to want to keep foreigners out, Camorra thugs, the Sicilian Mafia, and other Italian organized crime groups are in the business of selling weapons to ISIS terrorists in Europe. Other Italian crime groups in Southern Italy and Sicily are making money bringing in Nigerian and other African men and women. Organized crime and terrorism are therefore contributing to what globalists think is a “humanitarian” solution to the migrant crisis.

Italian politicians have begun to notice this irony, and have asked the Italian Navy to stop the private sea-going NGOs from Northern European countries that “rescue” boat people who are still within eyesight of the African coast.

One honest voice in Italian politics is Mayor Salvatore Martello of Lampedusa, who claims that unless Italy stops the influx of migrants, his island will “collapse.” Lampedusa, which is closer to the African coast than it is to Sicily, is often the first point of entry for Africans, and tourists are staying away because of a sharp increase in theft and assault.

Liberals are already calling the deployment of Italian troops to West Africa an act of neocolonialism. However, if the Italian Army can screen migrants before they get to Libya, Rome might be able to reduce the annual number of asylum seekers. Even better, the Italian Army could simply cut off migration routes from Niger into Libya. The deployment could be an important precedent of expanding the first-line of European defenses against the migrant invasion.

The Italian army may therefore help stem the rising tide of color. While globalists scoff at such “antiquated” fears, most have never been to Castel Volturno, a 2-1/2 hour drive down the coast from Rome. Here, the majority of the population is black (mostly from Nigeria), and hookers line the streets. An alliance between the Camorra and Nigerian street gangs keep the police out. As more migrants pour into Southern Italy and Sicily, more small towns and cities are becoming colonies of the Third World.