It was 8am, and the sun was already hot. The family of six – four women and two men from Ethiopia, across the Red Sea – had already walked eight miles (13km) so far that morning. They stopped to ask the soldiers for water before continuing on their journey.

“We didn’t know about the fighting in Yemen before we came on the boat last night,” said one of the group, Abdul Saleh Tayeb. “But we are looking for money. We have to go to Saudi Arabia.” They still had around 1,000 miles (1,400km) through disputed territories, mountain passes and scorching desert to go.

 

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The Guardian met Tayeb and his family during a visit to Yemen last September, swapping contact details, although their phone number has not worked since then. The family are some of the around 138,000 people from the Horn of Africa who made the dangerous journey across the Red Sea to Yemen last year in the hope of reaching the Gulf states and finding employment.

According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), as Europe has cracked down on routes over the Mediterranean from Turkey and Libya, the journey to Yemen is now the busiest maritime migration route in the world. Young men in an Aden park told the Guardian they paid 15,000 Ethiopian birr (£354) for the journey.

Almost none of the new arrivals from Ethiopia and Somalia know that war has raged in Yemen for the least five years, impeding their onward journey, or that torture and rape could await them at the hands of smugglers and traffickers. Now, aid agencies are warning that funding shortfalls and cuts and the spread of coronavirus in the country leaves Yemen’s hidden migrant population even more vulnerable.

Source: Yemen’s hidden migrants risk conflict and coronavirus in fight for survival