Armed clans, teenage hitmen, and abandoned neighborhoods turn the city into Europe’s epicenter of criminal violence
Soldecanarias.net / Redacciòn
The street leads nowhere. It is a narrow, winding dead-end slope, scarred by potholes, strewn with garbage, and overrun by weeds. It could belong to a war zone or an abandoned territory, yet it lies in Marseille, the city that today tops Europe’s violence rankings. Here, silence is not calm it is a warning. And bullets are the currency of power.
In these neighborhoods, drug trafficking clans are locked in a relentless battle for control of retail drug points, some of which generate up to €80,000 a day. Violence no longer follows old rules or recognizable hierarchies. “They’re crazed kids, drugged up, with no code at all. Some kill and then confess with pride,” says a police source who patrols areas where the state’s presence is barely visible.
The rise of the DZ Mafia has further intensified the conflict. This organization, which cannibalizes territory and absorbs rival networks, has industrialized chaos. It recruits young hitmen through social media, teenagers with no criminal records, no prospects, and a gun as their only promise of rapid advancement. One contract, one life erased and the chance to earn in days what they would never see in years.
Violence multiplies in a spiral that is increasingly hard to contain. Daylight executions, high-speed chases, bodies left behind as warnings. The line between victim and executioner blurs in a city where poverty, institutional abandonment, and the drug economy have created a perfect breeding ground for crime.
Marseille is living through a fragmented, permanent war, far from tourist postcards and painfully close to thousands of residents trapped between fear and resignation. This is the first installment of a series that enters the heart of a city besieged by drug trafficking, where violence no longer shocks—it is simply expected.
