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DAKAR, Senegal (Reuters) -- European Union patrols are intercepting the armada of illegal migrants from West Africa, stopping dozens a day. In response, migrants are shifting their departures farther down the Atlantic coast, officials said on Thursday.
As interceptions by Spanish and Italian aircraft and patrol boats increase in Senegal's waters, more and more migrants are trying to sneak off farther south from the mangrove-lined river deltas and islets of Gambia and Guinea-Bissau.
Since September 7, Senegalese, Spanish and Italian security forces have been conducting joint sea, air and land patrols, meshing with similar E.U.-coordinated operations already under way since August around Mauritania and Cape Verde.
Officials said these patrols had started to make some headway in disrupting the flotilla of flimsy open boats which has been ferrying record numbers of sub-Saharan Africans -- nearly 25,000 so far this year -- to the Spanish Canary Islands.
"We have patrol vessels and aircraft out in the seas and skies every day," said Lt. Col. Alioune Ndiaye, a Senegalese police officer who acts as spokesman for the Senegal operation of the EU's new border agency Frontex.
Spain's Civil Guard said that since the start of the Frontex patrols off West Africa last month, 40 craft carrying 2,379 would be migrants heading for Spain had been intercepted.
Migrant smugglers, denounced by U.N. crime experts as ruthless traffickers of humans they treat as disposable goods, were moving to more southernly countries like Gambia, the tiny state that pokes like a crooked finger into Senegal.
"Instead of leaving Senegal, more and more migrants are now departing from farther down the coast, from Gambia and Guinea-Bissau," Ndiaye said.
In the Gambian capital Banjul, police said more than 100 migrants and smugglers had been arrested since August.
"A greater number have left or are still leaving. ... It's a matter we're struggling with. The magnitude is very alarming," police spokesman Superintendent Aziz Bojang told Reuters.
"Gambia has very porous land borders. It has virtually no capability to police the seas around it," the British High Commissioner in Banjul, Eric Jenkinson, said.
Dreams of making money in 'fortress Europe'
Illegal migrants -- mostly young African men desperately fleeing poverty and unemployment in their own countries in search of a better life in wealthy "fortress Europe" -- have become a sensitive political issue in both Spain and Senegal.
Despite the coordinated crackdown, they keep on coming.
In the run-down Tobacco Road neighborhood of Banjul, a maze of low-rise concrete shacks with "Burn all cops" scribbled on one wall, many young men dream of making money abroad.
"Everybody here wants to travel," said Sulayman Balajo, 19, who has relatives in Britain and in the United States.
Off Senegal, an Italian reconnaissance plane and a Spanish helicopter act as spotters in the sky, while Senegalese and European patrol vessels zero in on the brightly painted wooden fishing boats, known as "pirogues," that carry the migrants.
Ndiaye said the patrols on Wednesday netted a large "pirogue" off Dakar carrying some 130 Africans, mostly Gambians. The day before, they cornered another pirogue carrying 67.
The Frontex operation involves 14 boats, two planes, two helicopters and crew from Spain, Italy and Portugal patrolling the waters off Mauritania, Senegal and the Canary Islands.
Sulayman Barry, 28, a Gambian market trader, had planned to leave with a Senegalese smuggling network. "The boat was too small. When I saw it, I decided not to risk my life," he said.
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