“Phase two kicked off a couple of years ago. Phase two was all about people fleeing the country for Europe. Exile and emigration, making a new life in a better place with better options. In phase two the young people got sent first, in the hopes that they’d be more resilient than the older folks. Fact is that those migration routes are tough. First you have to make it out of Iraq, which isn’t a given, since you have to pass through areas that are controlled by some very bad people. Next you have to choose between two evils, getting through Turkey, or swinging down through Jordan, and into Africa, then Libya, which has its own particular horrors. After that, you go by boat and try and get yourself washed up in Europe somehow.”

I said, “Ok, so what about the girls?”

“Those are the two phases, and we’re now talking about phase two. Most people take the second option, down through Jordan and through the desert. That way, you’ve got a better chance of making it to Europe and not getting hung up in Turkey. It started with one or two reports. Parents contacting us, concerned about their girls. Which happens all the time, half of what we do, find sons and daughters, mothers, fathers, grandparents and uncles and cousins. By and large, it’s only family who are willing to spend money and time looking for the missing. But Karim noticed a pattern, and started doing the leg work.”

Nazari said, “What was the pattern?”

“We get requests about people missing along migration routes quite often. If we are able to trace them, the usual thing is to find that they’ve drowned crossing the Mediterranean. That’s our normal expectation. This is the case seventy-five percent of the time. A lot of people die crossing. The other twenty-five percent usually turn up somewhere, Europe, Turkey, sometimes they make it to the UK. Mostly they don’t.”

I said, “How do you track them?”

Leila said, “Usually the only way to track people along those routes is by their mobile phone connections. Often they send pictures to family and friends, from borrowed phones, or phones they manage to get hold of along the way. From the pictures we can do forensic analysis and find the location.”

Nazari asked, “How do you do that?”

“Shadow analysis for time of day, matched up to metadata on the image file, usually JPEG. We can often triangulate the location using open source intelligence.”

“So Qadduri found a pattern.”