From The Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story. I'm Luke Jones.

I'm Luke Jones.

It's come to the general park in Rania and as you can hear, it really is the hub of the town.

There's live music, there's games, what they call Kurdish dominoes and OK Ford games.

Shama Bact is a reporter at the Times, and she's been in northern Iraq.

Men gather in literally in their hundreds to drink tea and to catch up over cigarettes

and shisha. But as we're speaking to all of these people, it's very clear that the reason why

so many people are able to gather in this park is because of a lack of job opportunities,

and there's real resentment around

that. There is one particularly thriving industry though providing many with lucrative job opportunities.

People smuggling. This small Iraqi town is arguably the epicenter of the small boats crisis playing out in the English Channel. Nearly all of the kingpins, foot soldiers, route navigators and the rest are from here. Why? The times went to go talk to them.

The story today, meet the smugglers behind Britain's small boats crisis. I've recently, in the past few years, kind of been following smuggling routes across the

world and specialise in migration.

You know, that's taken me to Poland and Belarus, Southeast Asia.

I've interviewed smugglers in northern France, and that kind of brought me on to this story.

Well, how exactly did you get into this one?

So because I was looking into these global smuggling routes, I kept coming across this

theme on the English Channel, which is one of the busiest routes in the world, but also

obviously the busiest route to the UK,

that the people who are running those small boat operations in northern France were almost

entirely Iraqi Kurds. And on top of that, I had heard from multiple global experts that

actually those Iraqi Kurds mostly came from one small village.

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