A UN agency reported on Tuesday that the latest tragedy on the dangerous migratory route from Africa claimed the lives of at least 39 people when a boat carrying more than 200 migrants capsized off Yemen.
Tragic event off the coast of Yemen: yesterday, a boat carrying 260 migrants sank. Regarding Monday’s disaster, the International Organization for Migration claimed on X that there were 39 dead, 150 missing, and 71 survivors.
The nationalities of the migrants were not specified in the post.
Tens of thousands of migrants leave the Horn of Africa every year in an attempt to cross the Red Sea and reach the oil-rich Gulf, hoping to escape violence, natural disasters, or dire economic prospects.
Only two weeks separated the April sinkings of two boats off the coast of Djibouti, which claimed many lives.
At the time, the IOM reported that, excluding this year, it had counted 1,350 deaths along the migration route since 2014.
It claimed to have recorded at least 698 deaths along the route in 2023 alone, 105 of which were at sea.
On Tuesday, the IOM declared that it was “giving survivors immediate aid.”
After making it to Yemen, migrants frequently face new dangers to their safety. The poorest nation on the Arabian Peninsula has been embroiled in a civil war for ten years.
Many are attempting to travel to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab nations in order to find employment as domestic helpers or laborers.
Human Rights Watch charged in August that between March 2022 and June 2023, Saudi border guards killed “at least hundreds” of Ethiopians attempting to enter the Gulf kingdom from Yemen, sometimes with the use of explosive weapons.
The group’s conclusions were rejected by Riyadh as “unfounded and not based on reliable sources”.
