A Covid mask covers his face, and the man standing next to a thick forest in Dunkirk is able to see.
The 30-year-old watches in silence as French police remove a nearby shanty town from which thousands waited for this year’s boats, ferrying them to Britain.
‘It is easy for these people to reach the UK,’ he boasts to me in perfect English, even though he is an Iraqi Kurd. ‘All you need is money. It is easier to have more than you need.
‘The police can pull down the camps, but the migrants will hide in the forest and then come out to catch boats across the sea.’
I spoke to the shadowy person last week, on condition that anonymity.

A migrant casually puffs a cigarette after a safe crossing – but really he’s a trafficker actor in a video shot in France to advertise smuggling gangs
Our conversation took place as the Mail established that rival people smuggling gangs are posting videos online to compete for business – using actors to play migrants ‘crossing’ to the UK.
The man in the Covid mask is a key player in one of Dunkirk’s ten gangs which, with ruthless efficiency enforced by guns, organise the never-ending migrant flow to the UK’s south coast.
He is the owner of a Dunkirk-based restaurant, and has now settled in France. He says he visits the UK to visit his extended family, which he moved to London to as an asylum seeker at age 18.
‘What is wrong with us sending migrants going to the UK?’ he asks me boldly. ‘Britain needs more workers and we Iraqi Kurds work hard.’
The traffickers are the dominant force in this country. They aren’t afraid to speak out against anyone and run circles around French police. This is the reason why I was able to meet the man last Thursday, even though he was a journalist.
They are also dangerous people. At gunpoint, they force migrants to board boats. Their gangs fight each other over the control of the boat crossings which make them millions.
They are at the root of what Home Secretary Priti Patel last week admitted is a ‘migration crisis’.
An anonymous Tory party donor told the Government this weekend that it could fall. A new poll found 77% said their approach was too soft.
Traffickers are aware that there is an insatiable market for passages to their boats. They will not stop trying to get in. On Friday, the former chief immigration officer for UK Border Force, Kevin Saunders, explained that migrants ‘know they’ve won the jackpot’ when they reach Britain.
‘The biggest draw is these people know everything in the United Kingdom is free, they are going to get education, medical treatment, money, accommodation.’
What’s more, he added, they ‘know that they’re not going to be removed, this is why they destroy all their documentation (in the Channel in sight of Dover)’.

The trafficker’s boat of choice: After being seized, eighteen grey dinghies (like the one shown in the video) were placed in a Kent warehouse.
The traffickers compete violently for customers to smuggle across the world, slip into Europe, and bring to Dunkirk beaches from where 24,000 – hundreds this weekend alone – have embarked this year.
A video showing migrants how easy it is to sail to the UK unchallenged is on the social media site TikTok. Amazingly, the video was produced by traffickers as a way to boost their business.
With supreme confidence, six men – one puffing casually on a cigarette – step out of a people smugglers’ dinghy on to a beach, disappearing along a sea wall for a new life in Britain.
The video is accompanied by a jaunty soundtrack of a popular Kurdish song which includes the lyrics: ‘We are here, we did not die.’
This is at most the happy ending the film’s makers want viewers to believe. It was actually faked. The film was not shot on Kent’s coast, but in Dunkirk. It features a distinctive skyline consisting of three large storage tanks of liquefied natural gases near a tall lighthouse.
And the men in the video who step out of the inflatable, left behind bobbing on the sea, are trafficker actors – not migrants reaching the UK.
‘The smugglers made it as a “come-on” advertisement to migrants,’ explains an immigration expert who advises the Government.
‘It sends a message that it is easy to cross the Channel, disappear into the UK, and the sea journey is safe.’
The two-toned grey dinghy seen in the video is clearly linked to the Dunkirk-based Kurdish Iraqi Smuggling Gang that regularly uses it for crossings. An inflatable made at home in Turkey is then shipped across Europe via Germany and France to migrants.
Earlier this year, we found 18 identically designed inflatables – both medium and mega-sized – in the ‘dinghy graveyard’, a Kent government warehouse where migrants’ discarded vessels are piled high.
Another image shows a mega-boat using the same two tone colour scheme being towable into Dover Harbour by Hurricane, the Border Force vessel Hurricane. This was after an extensive Channel rescue.
Our source explains: ‘The grey inflatable has become the traffickers’ boat of choice. These smuggling gangs have been buying this design in large quantities. This design is intentionally manufactured without any identification or logos to make it hard to trace it back to the Turkish factory it was made.
‘We fear Iraqi Kurdish traffickers now have their own factory in Turkey churning out these basic and anonymised grey boats.’
The number of sea arrivals is expected to surpass 30,000 by the end the year.
Laurent Martin de Morestal is the captain of Gendarmerie and oversees beach patrols in northern France. He says that his officers feel ragged from the sheer volume of boats arriving in large flotillas.
‘We have 24-hour, seven day a week surveillance. Multiple departure attempts are possible every 2 miles. We will stop one, two, three, four – but if we are busy elsewhere, the fifth or sixth will leave.’
France’s interior minister Gerald Darmanin says people smugglers have seized control of his country’s northern beaches, creating a migration ‘phenomenon’.
With the arrival of Afghans from Afghanistan fleeing Taliban attacks and others at the Belarus-Poland border, Dunkirk’s waiting list has grown.
Lucy Moreton of the Immigration Services Union warned that criminals or those trying to harm us are using the border force sea and land patrols as a way to avoid detection.
‘Since we don’t catch them, the reason they don’t want to be collected by us is speculative. But it is most likely they have a past criminal record, either in the UK, in Europe or their home countries, that they don’t want us to know,’ she says.
In July, the Mail saw a large group arrive near Kent’s Dungeness power station after being shepherded to safety by an RNLI lifeboat. After disembarking, they were found abandoned at the beach in their black mega-inflatable that had been taken from France.
An immigration official stated that the vessel’s outboard propeller had an orange guard. This meant the boat was designed to be used as a cover for secret beach landings.
‘These migrants did not expect – or want – to be found by border force or a lifeboat,’ he says.
‘The guard was put on to allow an undamaged and undetected landing on what the traffickers know will be a stony beach in Kent. They don’t want to be caught up in the asylum system for years.’
The same week, a group – thought to be Iraqi Kurds – arrived on an inflatable at Kingsdown beach near the White Cliffs of Dover. The group hid in the churchyard of a nearby village before they reached the backyard of a house.
They asked the owner for water and an outlet to charge their phones when they found them.
A villager told us: ‘They also asked to sleep in the owner’s garden overnight. They claimed they’d be picked up the next morning by a car to go to Manchester.
‘He alerted Border Force who came and took them away.’
Folkestone is home to many migrant escapees who have been seen walking and catching busses along the streets of suburban London towards the station that has direct connections to London.
The Mail found four migrants that had been stranded on the Dover coast and fled with their boats. They were seen walking up the A2 to the port, towards the blue Ford which was located beside the roundabout.
The driver was a bearded man in his 40s who stood by the vehicle using a cell phone. He drove quickly away from us when he saw us.
He was accompanied by four other migrants, all of whom were also carrying mobile phones. They fled into the nearby fields. The Ford was photographed and the registration number were handed to Kent police.
It was grey when it was first registered by the DVLA. Either the car was repainted or fake registration plates had been used.
The Mail discovered a TikTok clip with traffickers, which was also posted by them. British intelligence officers searching for immigrants are looking to find the source of the inflatable, as well as the members of the gang responsible.
A Home Office spokesman condemned the clip: ‘To promote or glamorise these crossings is disgraceful. It encourages people to leave safe countries and put their lives at risk.’
Miss Patel has written to TikTok, warning the company to remove ‘unacceptable’ videos promoting the ‘deadly activity’ of Channel crossings.
This will disappoint the Iraqi Kurd Trafficker with dark hair who claimed to have seen me in Dunkirk that migrants can easily sail into Britain.