The bones lie scattered across the desert floor, close to the beach. Along with some tattered clothes, a single banknote and a sun-bleached identity card, they are the only remains of a young Ethiopian man who risked everything for the chance of a better life in Saudi Arabia.
Wearing a surgical mask, Dr Youssouf Moussa, from the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), gathers them into a bundle that he buries in a makeshift grave. The site’s coordinates will be shared with the authorities in Obock, a small port town in Djibouti. But since the local graveyard is almost full, they will probably remain here in this lonely patch of desert a few miles to the north.
A few hundred metres away are more burial sites, marked by piles of black stones, testifying to the dangers of the journey. “These two graves both hold five people,” says Youssouf, gesturing at the mounds.
“That one holds 43, another 50. Behind that hill are more holding two, three, five and seven.”
Some of the dead succumbed to thirst or disease in the desert. Others drowned in disasters at sea. They are the victims of one of the world’s least understood and fastest-growing migration routes, known by aid groups as the “eastern corridor”.
The route is used mostly by Ethiopian migrants fleeing conflict, the climate crisis and destitution in their homeland, who travel in small boats from Somaliland and Djibouti, across the Gulf of Aden, to war-struck Yemen. From there they cross into Saudi Arabia on foot, hoping to find work.
Last year, 96,670 irregular migrants arrived on Yemen’s shores, an increase of 32% on 2022, according to the IOM. Moussa believes more migrants are taking the route partly because of the war in Sudan, which has made it harder for Ethiopians to get to Libya to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.
Yet the route receives scant attention in the wider world, in part because the migrants are not bound for Europe or North America.
“People don’t know much about this route,” he says. “Everyone talks about the Mediterranean, but you hardly hear about the eastern corridor.”
It is a perilous journey through some of the most punishing terrain anywhere. To reach Djibouti, the migrants must traverse vast expanses of desert and fields of sharp volcanic rock, with scant water and temperatures that can reach 50C (122F) in the summer. After the sea crossing, they must negotiate the war zone of Yemen.
Along the way, they are preyed upon by smugglers, bandits and militiamen. Migrants who cannot pay their traffickers are routinely detained and tortured until their families stump up money for their release. Sexual violence against women, who make up 21% of the migrants, is common.
If they make it to the Saudi border, the migrants face attacks from Saudi border guards. Last year a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report found hundreds, possibly thousands, of migrants had been killed at the border “in a pattern that is widespread and systematic”. Border guards shoot at smaller groups and fire mortars at bigger ones to deter them from crossing, according to Nadia Hardman, the report’s author.
“Everything points at a shoot-to-kill policy of anyone who crosses the border irregularly,” says Hardman. “I don’t know of any border force that kills and pushes back migrants so brutally.”
The midpoint for most migrants’ journeys is Obock, close to the Gulf of Aden’s narrowest point, the strait known as Bab al-Mandab, or Gate of Tears, because of the perilous navigation. At 20 miles (32km) wide, it is roughly as wide as the Dover strait. Small boats can cross this busy shipping lane, linking the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, in about an hour.
IOM has recorded about 1,400 drownings since 2014. This is likely to be only a fraction of the total. Many deaths go unrecorded when bodies are washed out to sea; still more people die in remote stretches of desert or at the Saudi border.
One large-scale tragedy happened in October when captains forcibly returning migrants from Yemen to Djibouti ordered people off their vessels and told them to swim ashore. At least 45 people drowned and more than 100 are still missing.
Two months later, the beach is strewn with discarded bottles and flip-flops, left by migrants going in the opposite direction. Two boats lie abandoned on the shore, destroyed by the Djiboutian coastguard. A short distance away, a group of migrants sit by a smuggler’s pickup. They will cross once night falls.
On the edge of Obock, Abebe also waits to make the voyage. He once worked as a charcoal dealer in Ethiopia’s Amhara region, but civil conflict destroyed his business. “It’s dangerous and there is no work,” says Abebe. “Almost all the youth are leaving to find a job and get distance from the war.”
Abebe had promised to pay the smugglers 160,000 Ethiopian birr (about £1,000) once he reached Yemen. He does not have the money but hopes his family will find it once he arrives by selling land or borrowing from neighbours.
“If not, we know we may imprisoned and tortured,” says Abebe. “It’s a huge risk, but I have no option.”
At a nearby water point, Tewelde prepares to make the crossing for the second time. When he first made the journey, in 2021, he passed rotting corpses and human skeletons at the Yemeni-Saudi border. During his current attempt, his group were attacked by armed men in the desert. They took everything he had: his money, mobile phone, even his clothes.
“They gathered us all together, held out a grenade and said, ‘If you don’t give us all you have, we will let this off,’” says Tewelde. At one point they opened fire, sending Tewelde running into the desert.
“There are so many risks – in the sea, in the desert,” he says. “I expect more challenges, even worse things, but I cannot live in Tigray. There is no work.”
The men passing through Obock hope to find work labouring on construction sites, digging irrigation ditches or as goatherds for 1,000-1,500 Saudi riyals (£210-£315) a month. It is not much, but far more than they could hope to make at home in Ethiopia. The women plan to work as domestic servants.
In the town, young Ethiopian migrants linger outside restaurants, hoping to snatch handfuls of leftover beans or rice before waiters chase them away. At dusk, they go to the port’s rubbish-strewn beach to sleep.
Many made the gruelling journey here without the help of smugglers, asking nomads the way and surviving on half-drunk bottles of water thrown out of windows by passing lorry drivers. They had hoped to make money in Obock to pay for the sea crossing, but there is little work and now they are marooned.
The IOM does its best to help. Its teams patrol the desert with boxes of dates, water and a medical kit to assist those in trouble. It also helps stranded migrants get home. But it struggles to cope with the thousands of migrants passing through Obock every day.
“We can’t help everybody, that’s impossible,” says Moussa. “But we hope to help the most vulnerable.”
They include Omar, a shy 18-year-old who left Ethiopia when heavy rain swept away his family farm. As he walked through the desert, he counted the bodies of 10 people who had died on the way. Three of his group were left behind, too weak to walk.
After his boat arrived in Yemen, the captain ordered them to get out in neck-high water and wade ashore. Several did not make it to the beach. Shortly afterwards he was kidnapped by an armed gang.
They held Omar in a forest with dozens of others, where they beat him with sticks and metal bars and demanded a ransom of 150,000 birr to release him. At one point, his captors held a gun to his head. “We were all bleeding and exhausted,” says Omar. “They said, ‘If you don’t have the money, we’ll kill you.’”
At IOM’s centre in Obock, Omar shows the scars on his wrists from the chains used to bind him. He was eventually released after his family transferred the money. After the kidnappers dumped him by the road, he was arrested and sent back to Djibouti. Now all he wants is to go home.
“The broker said the way was safe, that there would be no problems and I would get to Yemen easily,” says Omar. “It was all a lie.”
