Mogadishu airlift brings 148 Somalis home from Yemen as conflict grinds on
What we know
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Somalia has repatriated 148 of its citizens from Yemen, a country where conflict and economic collapse have made life increasingly untenable for refugees and migrants. The group — men, women and children — landed at Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport on a chartered flight, part of a joint operation led by the Somali government and international partners.
Officials from the Somali National Commission for Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (NCRI), along with representatives from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), coordinated the return. Senior government figures, including Abdisalam Abdi Ali, Somalia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, and NCRI Deputy Commissioner Abdullahi Aden Abdi, were on the tarmac to receive the arrivals.
Authorities said the returnees received immediate assistance — medical screenings, food, and basic support — to help them reconnect with family and begin the slow, often complicated work of rebuilding a life. Many have been away for years, part of a generation that once looked across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen as a refuge, only to find that war can flip the safest route into the most perilous overnight.
On the tarmac in Mogadishu
The scene at Aden Adde was familiar to a city that has seen multiple waves of displacement and return. Aid workers ushered families into shaded corners for health checks. Children clutched the hands of parents who appeared both relieved and disoriented. Officials guided people toward buses for processing and onward travel. The choreography is practiced, but never easy: every arrival is the end of one ordeal and the start of another.
Somali authorities framed Monday’s operation as part of a broader pledge to assist citizens trapped by Yemen’s grinding conflict or stranded during risky journeys north toward the Gulf. Over the past decade, Yemen — just 300 kilometers across the water — has been both a destination and a transit corridor for people from the Horn of Africa searching for work in Saudi Arabia and beyond. As Yemen’s war deepened, that corridor narrowed into a gauntlet.
Why it matters
The airlift underscores a basic paradox of migration in this region: the same sea that once carried Somalis to safety during their own civil war now carries them back from a neighbor in flames. Yemen’s prolonged conflict has crippled institutions, decimated the economy, and left millions in need of aid. For refugees and migrants, the collapse of public services — health, education, policing — means fewer lifelines when things go wrong.
For Somalia, the return of citizens from Yemen is both a humanitarian act and a policy test. Reintegration is hard. Returnees need identification documents, housing, livelihoods, and in many cases trauma support. NRCI and its partners will have to stitch together assistance in a country juggling its own security challenges, recurrent droughts and floods, and an economy still struggling to absorb a young, fast-growing population.
Yet the symbolism is significant. In a region where headlines are too often dominated by tragedy at sea and grim statistics, voluntary returns coordinated in daylight, with medical care and a plan for what comes next, offer a counter-narrative: that states and agencies can cooperate to reduce harm and give people a dignified way home.
The bigger picture
Migration through Yemen is one of the world’s most fluid and least understood corridors. Despite the war, tens of thousands of people — many of them Ethiopians and Somalis — still attempt the crossing each year, lured by seasonal work and the possibility, however faint, of a better wage across the border. Smugglers prey on that hope. The risks are well documented: detention, extortion, dangerous sea crossings, and exposure to front lines that shift without warning.
What drives the movement? The same pressures reshaping migration routes globally: economic stagnation, climate stress that ruins crops and livestock, and conflict that uproots communities. Somalia knows these forces intimately. When droughts strip rural families of income, or floods destroy a village’s only market road, young people weigh their options. In that context, Yemen can feel both near and necessary — until it is not.
International agencies caution that voluntary return is only one tool among many. People will continue to move as long as the push factors endure. That is why the support offered on arrival matters — not only to reduce immediate vulnerability, but to anchor households so that a second, riskier journey does not feel inevitable. Cash assistance for rent and food, vocational training tied to market demand, and community-based counseling are proven parts of that toolbox. Somali officials say similar measures are being scaled up in partnership with donors.
Regional reverberations
Across the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, governments are rethinking migration management. Some are tightening borders; others are negotiating labor agreements to channel movement into safer, legal pathways. The return of 148 Somalis from Yemen won’t reset this complex calculus. But it is a reminder that policy choices are not abstract. They register in the lives of specific families who line up for health checks at a windswept airport and ask where they will sleep tonight.
There is also a lesson in timing. Humanitarian corridors often open quietly, then close as budgets tighten or fighting flares. Sustaining them requires political attention and predictable funding — both rare commodities. If Somalia, UNHCR and IOM can keep this airbridge steady, even at modest scale, it will save lives while larger solutions are debated in capitals from Mogadishu to Riyadh and Brussels.
What happens next
For now, officials in Mogadishu say more flights could follow, depending on security conditions and resources. The immediate priority is to process the arrivals, reunite families, and connect returnees with services in their home regions. That work will fall to a patchwork of agencies and local authorities — and to the resilience of communities that, time and again, have absorbed those coming home with little more than the clothes on their backs.
As Somalia navigates this moment, a broader question lingers, familiar to many countries on the front lines of global displacement: How do you turn a safe return into a genuinely new beginning? The answer, as ever, will be measured not in statements or ceremonies, but in whether the children who stepped off that plane enroll in school, whether their parents find steady work, and whether next season’s pressures push another cohort toward the water’s edge.
In the meantime, the arrival of Flight 148 is a small but clear statement: in a hard season for migrants, there is still a way home.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
