"Twelve guys from the middle of nowhere, where there's probably no running water and there's no electricity and no... nothing. Executed at the doorstep of the U.S. military - it just didn't make sense."
--Cam Simpson, Chicago Tribune reporter

When the Chicago Tribune's Cam Simpson heard a report on the evening news about 12 Nepalese men who were kidnapped and brutally executed by an extremist Islamic group in Iraq, he was disturbed and intrigued. The men were on their way to jobs in support of American troops, and, according to the group's website, they were killed for cooperating with America's "crusader forces" in Iraq. Simpson, familiar with the military's increasing privatization of support operations, smelled a big story. In a classic case of dogged investigative reporting, he traced each step of the Nepalese men's journey from the foothills of the Himalayas to their brutal murder in Iraq, and in the process illustrated a vast international human trafficking network with ties to American corporations.

Read Cam Simpson's investigative report, "Pipeline to Peril," on human trafficking and the war in Iraq, originally published in October 2005.