From The Times and The Sunday Times, this is The Story.
I'm Luke Jones.
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 board games.
Shema Bakht is a reporter at The Times, and she's been in northern Iraq.
Men gather 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 epicentre 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 the story.
Well, how exactly did you get into this one?