Every year, thousands of migrants make dangerous boat trips to war-torn Yemen, many with the aim of traveling overland to the Gulf countries in search of work. But recently, many migrants have called for it to stop, forcing a protracted and often dangerous flow out of the Horn of Africa at sea and then north through Yemen to the Gulf states for work.
Their hopes for a better future have been thwarted by coronavirus restrictions and security conditions, leaving them in a country where millions are already living on the brink of starvation.
Dozens have drowned in recent weeks after boats smuggled by human traffickers capsized on their way back to the Horn of Africa. The UN migration agency IOM estimates that more than 11,000 migrants have returned by boat in the past year. Now it is flying so that the migrants can return safely.
“I wanted to go to Saudi Arabia to work so I came to Yemen. That’s when I found out there was a war in Yemen, I did not know,” said Jamal Hussein, an Ethiopian immigrant who boarded a UN-led repatriation flights from Yemen. , said before Tuesday’s flight home.
He used to work in fields that cultivated the stimulating qat in Ethiopia’s Oromia region before he risked that everything would migrate less than a year ago.
After reaching the northern capital, Sanaa, which is controlled by the Houthi movement, he said he was detained with other migrants in a facility. Last month, he survived a fire in the center that killed dozens.
With COVID-19 and security restrictions blocking routes to the Gulf states, thousands of migrants facing a stigma due to the pandemic have been detained and forcibly transferred back to southern Yemen, where the internationally recognized government is based.
After the fire, Houthi transferred Hussein and others to a desert area, he said, from where he went to Aden and found help from the IOM. It said a first group of 1,100 Ethiopians had been approved for “voluntary humanitarian return”, with Tuesday’s flight the second being driven to take people home.
Thousands of others are waiting for their nationality to be verified and travel documents to be provided, it says. More than 32,000 migrants, mostly Ethiopians, remain stranded across Yemen under difficult circumstances, the agency said.
Yemen has been embroiled in violence since a Saudi coalition intervened against Houthis in 2015, in which 80% of Yemen’s people needed help.
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