Following the rapid Houthi takeover of the capital, Sanaa, and much of Yemen’s north in 2014 and 2015, the poorest country in the Middle East found itself on the receiving end of a deadly, Saudi-led air campaign. Since then, nearly 20,000 Yemenis are estimated to have perished as a result of the aerial bombardment.
Saudi Arabia viewed the Houthi expansion in Yemen as a threat on its doorstep, given the Houthis’ close ties to Iran, leading to a Saudi-led military intervention that included nine allied Arab states.
In April 2022, a truce brokered by the United Nations led to a temporary cessation of hostilities between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis for a six-month period. Since then, direct talks have managed to contain the fighting, but they have not led to a final political settlement.
While tens of thousands of refugees and asylum-seekers in Yemen remain at the mercy of the shaky cease-fire between the Houthis and Saudi-led coalition, more dangers arise by the day. After the Houthis stepped up attacks on commercial shipping and Israeli targets following the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, the United States, United Kingdom, and their allies bombed targets in Yemen in retaliation.
“We are neither refugees nor citizens,” Mohamed Uthman Aden, 42, told Foreign Policy over the phone from his home in the battered Yemeni capital of Sanaa in November 2024.
Aden is among more than 70,000 refugees and asylum-seekers in Yemen who find themselves in a state of limbo, made worse by years of conflict and political instability.
Hailing from a family of herders, Aden was born in the town of Hamaro in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, where a war between ethnic Somali separatists from the Ogaden National Liberation Front and Ethiopia’s government had been raging since the early 1990s.
“Anything that moved would get hit with a hail of bullets,” Aden said. “They [the government forces] didn’t even spare the livestock.”
At the time, Ethiopia’s government was waging a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that saw the state unleash scorched-earth policies against communities suspected of supporting the rebels—communities such as Aden’s.
In 2009, Aden was snatched off the street and arrested by Ethiopian government troops, spending the next four years in Jail Ogaden. The facility is an infamous prison in Ethiopia where thousands of people were reportedly held under arbitrary detention, in which torture, rape, and death were a common occurrence, as documented by international rights groups prior to its closure in 2018.
“When I woke up in the cell, some of the bodies lying next to me were cold—that’s when I knew they were already dead,” Aden told me.
“When I was released in 2013, I didn’t know where to start, but I knew I had to reconnect with my family somehow. … On the journey back, I saw abandoned water wells and empty villages everywhere. …That’s when I realized most people had either fled or been killed,” Aden recalled.
Upon returning to his hometown of Hamaro, Aden discovered that when he was arrested four years ago, his wife—Safiya Yusuf—had fled to Yemen and given birth to their first child at a refugee camp.
Aden then made the decision to leave. After traveling to Loyacade, a coastal town on the border of Djibouti and Somalia, he boarded a small boat at nightfall with 10 other Somali refugees, with hopes of reuniting with his family in Yemen. He made it; some of the others did not.
Death is common during the treacherous journey across the Gulf of Aden, which sits between Yemen and the Horn of Africa. In the 10-year period from 2014 to 2024, the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration documented 1,860 people who had either died or disappeared crossing the Gulf of Aden, including 480 who drowned.
In the years that followed, Aden and his wife had seven more children. But when the Saudi-led coalition’s air campaign began, no one was safe—including refugees seeking asylum, Aden explained.
Aden and his loved ones soon realized that even staying indoors wouldn’t save them from the onslaught. Late one night, in the apartment building that the family had called home, they were hit.
“Out of nowhere, we could feel heavy winds from a plane blowing in our direction,” he said. “The building started trembling once again. Then we heard a loud explosion.”
Aden and his family only sustained minor injuries from the airstrike, but a part of the building had collapsed, which forced them to move, leading the family to become displaced once more.
“We fled war and violence, only to suffer from even more war and violence. We have no support. It’s as if we are stateless,” he told Foreign Policy.
Mohamed al-Hojily, a political analyst based in Sanaa, believes the effects of the war in Yemen on African migrants are underreported and often overlooked—made worse by limited resources that migrants have access to.
“Refugees need better protection, but also, there need to be laws in place that guarantee their well-being in Yemen,” Hojily said in a phone interview.
Many African migrants who’ve been caught up in Yemen’s conflict attest that they find themselves in similar—and in some cases, worse—situations than the countries and regions that they initially fled.
“When I took the journey across the Gulf of Aden, I never thought I’d suffer from further conflict,” said Raha Mohamud, 36, who spoke to Foreign Policy by phone from the Yemeni city of Al-Ghaydah. Like Aden, Mohamud fled the war-ravaged Ogaden region of Ethiopia.
“The war was a part of everyday life,” she said. “There were always displaced people fleeing to the city. But even in the cities, you weren’t safe. The Ethiopian troops often didn’t differentiate between rebels and civilians because we were all Somalis.”
Mohamud recounted, “In 2008, my mother and brother were shot dead, execution style, by Ethiopian soldiers in front of me.”
That was when she made the decision to leave, first traveling to the coastal city of Bosaso in Somalia—a major route used by migrants to reach Yemen and beyond.
“When I reached Bosaso, I paid smugglers to get on a boat heading across the Gulf of Aden. … There were around 150 people on the boat with me. That consisted mainly of women, children, and young men. It took us two days and two nights to reach the shores of Yemen,” she said.
“Once we arrived on shore, there were dead bodies everywhere strewn out on the sands,” she added.
Mohamud recalled one of the fellow Somali migrants from her boat whispering that these were the people that left on the boat before theirs.
The same year that Mohamud reached Yemen, 2008, there were 50,000 Somali migrants who arrived there—a 70 percent increase from the previous year, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
In the years that followed, things seemed to look bright for her. She fell in love with a fellow Somali refugee, got married, and gave birth to a son named Mohamed Deeq. She then got a job working as a housekeeper in Sanaa—but things suddenly changed in 2015.
“At the time, I was working as a housekeeper for a Yemeni family, and I’d often take my young son with me,” she said. “There were loud explosions all over the city that day because the planes kept bombing. My son got scared and crawled under the bed.”
The two-story home that Mohamud was in at the time was then hit in an airstrike. The young mother was knocked unconscious and woke up in a pool of blood.
“When I woke up, there was debris everywhere and a group of people standing over me. That’s when I realized I couldn’t move my legs. Then I heard voices saying that there was an airstrike that hit the home, while they stood over me.”
She found out that her son, just 3 at the time, had suffered only minor injuries. She believes that his decision to crawl under the bed in the run-up to the airstrike is what saved him. Her Yemeni employer died in the incident.
For the next two months, Mohamud was bedridden and took medication while she recovered from the wounds caused by the airstrike until she was able to walk again. But it didn’t end there.
She had to flee once more, this time to the southern Yemeni city of Al-Ghaydah due to fears of falling victim to more airstrikes if she remained in Sanaa as the Saudi-led coalition terrorized the city from above.
“I’ve been fleeing from one place to another nearly my entire life. War spares no one.” Mohamud said.
Despite such bleak circumstances, another 90,000 migrants arrived in Yemen in 2023, according to U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, surpassing the number of migrants that arrived on Yemen’s shores the year before.
“The situation of the refugees depends a lot on the outcomes of the If these talks fail, the cease-fire will be scrapped and war will be reignited, with many of these African refugees and asylum-seekers likely to face harder and even more brutal circumstances,” said Hojily, the Sanaa-based political analyst.
The government of Oman has played a major role in facilitating talks between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia in the years after the shaky cease-fire began nearly three years ago. However, by late 2024, the Omani-facilitated talks had stalled, leading to fears that the conflict could reignite.
Both Aden and Mohamud find themselves stateless—and in a state of uncertainty. They have escaped one war zone only to be trapped in another. Making matters worse is the uneasy cease-fire prevailing in Yemen. The guns have gone silent, but one can only wonder for how long.
Despite the dire situation that many refugees endure in Yemen, many more are likely to take the dangerous voyage across the Gulf of Aden as wars, insurgencies, and the climate crisis continue to displace people across the Horn of Africa, forcing many young people to flee, not realizing the bleak circumstances that await them in Yemen.
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