(Reuters) – The twisted metal and bloodstained rubble of a detention centre in mountainous northern Yemen on Monday marked the end of an arduous journey for scores of migrants killed in what the Houthi group said was a U.S. airstrike.
They were among the hundreds of thousands of Africans who cross the Bab al-Mandab strait each year on flimsy boats and make their way through the war zone of Yemen seeking to reach Saudi Arabia in the hope of finding work.
The migrant trail to Saudi Arabia gets less international attention than those to Europe or the United States, but a report last year by the U.N. migration agency called it one of the “busiest and riskiest migration corridors in the world”.
It involves crossing deserts by foot, paying unscrupulous smugglers, braving an uncertain sea, risking abuse at the hands of armed factions and then crossing a highly defended mountain border that has for years been an active front line.
A Human Rights Watch report in 2023 also alleged widespread abuses by Saudi border guards – including the targeting of groups of migrants with mortar and gunfire, allegations that the Saudi government called unfounded.
The kingdom is the world’s top oil exporter and home to millions of foreign workers – many of them undocumented migrants eking out a living as domestic servants and labourers and saving up money to send back home.
Despite the risks of the journey – or of being detained in Saudi Arabia and repatriated by a government that has launched repeated crackdowns over the past decade – large numbers continue to attempt it, fleeing poverty or war.
While the largest number of people attempting to reach Saudi Arabia through Yemen are Ethiopians, large numbers of Sudanese and Somalis also attempt the journey, the U.N. agency the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said.
They cross the desert by foot from Ethiopia into Djibouti or Somalia and pay smugglers around $300 for a boat to Yemen. The voyage is not long but last year more than 500 people were recorded as drowning after boats capsized or sank, IOM reported.
DANGER
Inside Yemen, migrants leave the area controlled by the internationally recognised government and go north into areas held by the Houthis – an Iran-aligned group that seized the capital in 2014.
Yemen’s civil war has rumbled on for more than a decade, alternating periods of intense warfare and lower-level conflict. The country is awash with weapons and local or tribal writ often supersedes rule by either side’s government.
Migrants have reported sexual assaults, forced labour and extortion while crossing Yemen.
The Saudi border represents the last big danger. Since 2015 it has been a frontline in the kingdom’s military campaign with the Houthis, with repeated raids by Yemeni fighters over the frontier in the early stages of the conflict.
However, major fighting calmed with ceasefire talks in 2022 and the more populated areas of the border remain major crossing points – as they have been for decades.
That area of border rises sharply from the damp heat of the Red Sea coastal plain through rough scrubby mountains and into deep reed-filled valleys with terraced fields and ancient stone villages clinging to the slopes above.
During a Reuters visit to the frontier a decade ago, groups of migrants could be seen hiding in bushes and trying to rush across a dirt track patrolled by Saudi border guards.
Even then, fatalities were common. Now, after years of war that has littered the ground with landmines and left border guards jumpy, it is more dangerous than ever.
(Reporting by Andrew Mills and Angus McDowall; Editing by Andrew Havens)
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