Responding to Shifting Cocaine Trafficking Routes Across the Sahel with Mobile Screening Vans
The recently published August 2026 report Cocaine and Conflict in Mali, Niger and Libya by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) provides an important and timely analysis of how cocaine trafficking is reshaping the security landscape across the Sahel and North Africa. The full report is attached for reference.
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Their research shows a highly adaptive trafficking ecosystem connecting West Africa, the Sahel, North Africa and European markets. GI TOC identifies four principal overland corridors beginning at arrival points in West Africa, crossing the Sahel and exiting through Libya, Morocco or Mauritania towards Europe.
When pressure increases, routes change. When political control changes, networks adapt. Trafficking does not simply disappear.
Cocaine revenues interact with conflict economies, armed actors and protection networks. GI-TOC finds that trafficking revenues reinforce protection economies and provide financing to actors operating in an already fragile security environment. This makes counter-narcotics a geopolitical security issue, including for Europe.
Europe cannot address the cocaine threat exclusively at its own external borders and major ports. There is a strategic case for helping partner countries identify and disrupt trafficking further upstream, before consignments move through established trans-Sahelian networks and continue north.
Disrupting these networks further upstream can support security and institutional resilience within affected African states while also reducing the movement of cocaine towards European markets.
But there is an operational problem: traffickers are mobile while traditional inspection infrastructure is fixed.
This is where we believe the unival MBX can make a difference.
MBX brings high-performance backscatter X-ray inspection directly to the operational environment. It enables authorities to establish temporary, intelligence-led vehicle screening on secondary roads, border corridors and other locations where permanent inspection infrastructure is unavailable or where trafficking patterns have shifted.
Backscatter imaging can reveal concealed packages and anomalous organic-rich masses, providing operators with a rapid means of selecting vehicles for further examination.
Intelligence identifies the route. MBX brings the inspection capability to it. The objective should not only be to intercept cocaine when it reaches Europe. The stronger strategy is to disrupt trafficking networks earlier, closer to the routes where organized crime converts narcotics into money, influence and instability.
Credit to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) and its researchers for putting renewed attention on this important security challenge.
As trafficking routes continue to adapt, authorities need inspection capabilities that can be deployed where operational priorities change. Mobile screening provides the flexibility to support vehicle inspection beyond permanent checkpoints and established border infrastructure. Explore our mobile screening solutions and learn more about the MBX and other mobile inspection platforms through the link below.