When we met al-Khal in late September, he was organizing two to three trips a day to the Greek island of Lesbos, about eight miles from the Turkish coastline. He fits 30 to 50 people a raft and charges $1,000 to $1,500 per person. Each crossing costs him between $10,000 and $15,000. In the past two years, he claims to have made more than $2 million.

With nearly 400,000 people arriving illegally in Greece this year, the refugee crisis has been good to him. And he is not alone: the underground economy of human smuggling is thriving. According to some calculations, there are up to 2,000 fellow smugglers in Izmir, while the trade on European territory is thought to employ up to 30,000 people.

We meet al-Khal at a café overlooking the beautiful bay in this, Turkey’s third largest city. He shows off some of his merchandise: fake Turkish, Syrian, and European ID cards, driver’s licenses, and passports. He assures us these documents sell for as much as several thousand Euros.

Before he was the King of the Shores, al-Khal was an officer in the Syrian military. In April 2012, he received orders to shoot at peaceful demonstrators on the outskirts of Damascus. He chose instead to defect, along with 50 of his subordinates, and join the Free Syrian Army in Homs. Once in rebel territory, he opened a weapons factory, which he says he still runs, supplying RPGs, GRAV missiles, sniper telescopic sights, Kalashnikovs, 9mm pistols, and other weaponry to a number of actors fighting in the brutal conflict. Al-Khal continues to fund an FSA brigade, though he considers the rebel forces to be in disarray and left the fighting behind in 2014 after suffering a serious injury in combat.