Foreign Policy: How did African migrants fall into the trap of Yemen?

“Anything that moved was shot at, even cattle were killed,” he said. At the time, the Ethiopian government was waging a brutal counterinsurgency campaign, in which the state unleashed scorched-earth policies against communities suspected of supporting the rebels — communities like Mohammed Osman’s.

In 2009, Mohamed was snatched off the street by Ethiopian government forces and arrested, spending the next four years in Ogaden Prison. Ethiopia’s notorious prison is where thousands of people were reportedly held arbitrarily, and where torture, rape and death were commonplace, as documented by international human rights organizations before it was closed in 2018.

“When I woke up in the cell, some of the bodies lying next to me were cold, and then I knew they were really dead,” says Mohammed Othman.

“When I was released in 2013, I didn’t know where to start, but I knew I had to connect with my family somehow… On the way back, I saw abandoned water wells and empty villages everywhere… That’s when I realized that most people had either fled or been killed,” he added.

Upon returning to his hometown of Hamra, Mohammed discovered that his wife, Safia Yousef, who had been arrested four years earlier, had fled to Yemen and given birth to their first child in a refugee camp.

Then Mohammed made the decision to leave. After traveling to Loyakad, a coastal town on the border between Djibouti and Somalia, he boarded a small boat at nightfall with ten other Somali refugees, hoping to be reunited with his family in Yemen. He succeeded, while some others did not.

Death is common during the treacherous journey across the Gulf of Aden, which lies between Yemen and the Horn of Africa. Between 2014 and 2024, the UN’s International Organization for Migration documented 1,860 people dying or going missing while crossing the Gulf of Aden, including 480 who drowned.

In the years that followed, Mohammed and his wife had seven more children. But when the Saudi-led coalition’s air campaign began, no one was safe — including refugees seeking asylum, he said.

Mohammed and his loved ones soon realized that staying in their homes would not save them from the attack. Late one night, the apartment building where the family lived was bombed.

Mohammed and his family only suffered minor injuries in the airstrike, but part of the building collapsed, forcing them to move, displacing the family once again. “We fled war and violence, only to suffer more war and violence. We have no support. It’s like we have no nationality,” he told Foreign Policy.

Mohammed Al-Hajili, a political analyst based in Sanaa, believes the effects of the war in Yemen on African migrants are under-reported and often ignored – and made worse by the limited resources migrants have access to.

“Refugees need better protection, but there also needs to be laws that ensure their safety in Yemen,” Al-Hajili said in a phone interview.

Many African migrants who have fallen victim to the conflict in Yemen say they find themselves in conditions similar to – and in some cases worse than – those they found in the countries and regions they initially fled.

“When I made the journey across the Gulf of Aden, I never imagined I would experience more conflict,” said Raha Mahmoud, 36, who spoke to Foreign Policy by phone from the Yemeni city of Al Ghaydah. Like Mohamed Osman, Raha Mahmoud fled Ethiopia’s war-torn Ogaden region.

“War was part of everyday life,” she says, “and there were always displaced people fleeing to the city. But even in the cities, you were not safe. Often the Ethiopian forces did not differentiate between rebels and civilians because we were all Somalis.”

“In 2008, my mother and brother were shot dead in front of me by Ethiopian soldiers, execution-style,” she said. That was when she made the decision to leave, travelling first to the coastal city of Bosaso in Somalia – the main route migrants use to get in and out of Yemen.

“When I arrived in Bosaso, I paid smugglers to get on a boat across the Gulf of Aden… There were about 150 people on the boat with me. Most of them were women, children and young people. It took me two days and two nights to reach the shores of Yemen,” she said.

"Once we got to the beach, there were bodies scattered everywhere on the sand," she added. She recalled one of the Somali migrants on her boat whispering that these were the people who had left on the boat before them.

The same year Raha arrived in Yemen, 2008, 50,000 Somali migrants arrived there, a 70 percent increase on the previous year, according to the UN refugee agency.

In the years that followed, things looked bright for her. She fell in love with a fellow Somali refugee, got married, and had a son, Mohammed Deeq. She got a job as a housekeeper in Sana’a — but then things changed suddenly in 2015.

“At the time, I was working as a housekeeper for a Yemeni family, and I would often take my young son with me,” she said. “There were loud explosions all over the city that day because the planes kept bombing. My son got scared and crawled under the bed.”

Then the two-storey house where Mohammed was living at the time was hit by an airstrike. The young mother lost consciousness and woke up in a pool of blood.

“When I woke up, there was rubble everywhere and a group of people standing over me,” she said. “That’s when I realized I couldn’t move my legs. Then I heard voices saying that an airstrike had hit the house, while they were standing over me.”

She discovered that her son, who was only three years old at the time, had only sustained minor injuries. She believes his decision to crawl under the bed in the run-up to the airstrike saved him. Her Yemeni employer died in the incident.

For the next two months, Raha Mahmoud remained bedridden, taking medication as she recovered from the injuries she sustained in the airstrike, until she was able to walk again. But it didn’t end there.

She had to flee again, this time to the southern Yemeni city of Ghaydah, fearing more airstrikes if she stayed in Sanaa. “I’ve been running from place to place almost my entire life,” she says. “War spares no one.”

Despite these bleak conditions, another 90,000 migrants arrived in Yemen in 2023, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, exceeding the number of migrants who reached Yemen’s shores the previous year.

“The refugee situation depends a lot on the outcome of the talks,” said Al-Hajili, a political analyst based in Sanaa. “If these talks fail, the ceasefire will be cancelled and the war will start again, and many of these African refugees and asylum seekers are likely to face even more difficult and brutal conditions.”

The government of Oman played a key role in facilitating talks between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia in the years following a fragile ceasefire that began nearly three years ago. However, by late 2024, the Omani-facilitated talks had stalled, raising fears that the conflict could flare up again.

Both Mohammed Osman and Raha Mahmoud are stateless – and in limbo. They fled one war zone only to find themselves trapped in another. What makes matters worse is the uneasy ceasefire that prevails in Yemen. The guns may have fallen silent, but one can only wonder for how long?

Despite the dire situation of many refugees in Yemen, many more are likely to make the perilous journey across the Gulf of Aden, as wars, insurgencies and the climate crisis continue to displace people across the Horn of Africa, forcing many young people to flee, unaware of the bleak conditions that await them in Yemen.

Source: Foreign Policy