Gabriele Del Grande is a freelance journalist, writer and film director. Currently based in Greece, he has been travelling across the Mediterranean for over a decade, since he founded in 2006 the blog Fortress Europe, an observatory of the victims of migration along the EU borders. He was in Tunisia and Egypt during the 2011 protests and he covered part of the wars in Libya and Syria. In 2014 he co-directed the documentary film On the Bride’s Side, the true story of a fake wedding convoy planned by a group of Italians and Syrians to smuggle across Europe five friends fleeing the conflict. One year ago he was arrested in Turkey while he was investigating the security apparatus of the Islamic State for the last of his four books: Dawla. A history of Isis told by its former affiliates (Mondadori, 2018). The extensive fieldwork for his book as well as the production of his movie were totally crowdfunded by almost four thousand supporters.

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