After hundreds of kilometers of vast arid flats, Ethiopian migrants encounter a point where the Djiboutian desert meets the sea. On the other side, just 30 kilometres away, the mountains of Yemen pop up. This is the Bab-el-Mandab, Arabic for the ‘Gate of Tears’, where the African continent almost meets the Arabian Peninsula.
An unknown number of migrants die in these waters; IOM doctor Youssouf Moussa (white kufi, 4rd picture) showed me pictures of drowned women and children, swollen by the sea and eaten by the fish. He and his team buried the bodies in makeshift graves on the beach, under piles of black stones.
Last year, over 123,000 people came into Djibouti, to make the dangerous journey into war-torn Yemen; many want to reach Saudi Arabia to work there. But for all the optimistic migrants who traveled with smugglers to the coast, we also met large groups of disillusioned migrants turning back.
Suicidal, traumatised people, who as “failed migrants” fear to go home empty handed. In Yemen, women have been raped by smugglers, men were tortured. Videos of the beatings were sent to relatives in Ethiopia, so they would pay ransom for their loved ones to be released.
Those who still made it through, told us how the smugglers dropped them at the Saudi border, where they “had to run like Usain Bolt” while the border police used them as “target practice”.