Lonely graves, scattered bones: the stark reality of one of the most overlooked and fastest-growing migration routes

The beach at Obock is covered in debris, much of it from a disaster in October in which at least 45 migrants being deported from Yemen drowned after being forced off boats into the water. All photographs by Fred Harter Photograph: Fred Harter

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.