At least 139 migrants died, including 15 children, when a ship carrying more than 300 people from Djibouti to Yemen capsized last week, the U.N. International Organization for Migration said Sunday. Another 84 people are still unaccounted for.
The vessel left Djibouti on the night of October 8 with 305 people aboard, a load far beyond what it was built to carry. It went down north of the port town of Obock. According to the IOM, nine girls and six boys were among the dead recovered — a toll that makes the sinking one of the worst single disasters recorded on the Djibouti-Yemen crossing.
Answers scarce, bodies plentiful
Why the boat overturned is still not clear. What was unmistakable was the aftermath: bodies and clothing washing up along the shore, and local authorities struggling to keep pace.
Alexandre Coissac, the IOM’s chief of mission in Djibouti, said the loss of life was “devastating” and a reminder of what people face on a corridor that migrants use to reach economic opportunity. He said getting an exact death toll is nearly impossible in cases like this because survivors and locals bury some of the dead themselves, often without identifying them. The local response, he added, was overwhelmed by the sheer number of bodies arriving at once.
Interviewing survivors came with its own difficulties. Coissac described them as being in a state of shock.
“What is terrible is that they were buried with no names, in a common grave, like in a war situation,” he said. “They all have a mother, a father, and we may never learn what happened.”
The world’s most crowded migration route
The Bab el-Mandeb strait that separates the Horn of Africa from the Arabian Peninsula is only about 12.5 miles wide at its narrowest point, a short hop by any measure. It is also extraordinarily dangerous, and not only during periods of active fighting over the waterway.
Traffic usually flows in the other direction. Yemenis have been crossing to Africa to escape renewed combat between the country’s government and the Iran-backed Houthi insurgency. Even so, the IOM says migrants continue to move from Djibouti toward Yemen in large numbers, hoping to eventually reach Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states where work is more available.
Most of those on the route come from Ethiopia and Somalia. The IOM said every survivor pulled from the water after last week’s capsizing was Ethiopian. The agency reported a recent increase in departures from Ethiopia driven by drought and fresh fighting between the central government and Tigrayan insurgents.
The scale of the corridor is difficult to overstate. More than 900 migrants died attempting the same passage in 2025, while roughly half a million people survived the journey that year. The cumulative numbers point to a route that has become one of the world’s busiest — and deadliest — for irregular migration.
Agency appeals for action
The IOM framed the sinking as part of a broader pattern rather than an isolated tragedy. In its statement, the agency pointed to poverty, insecurity and the growing effects of climate change as forces pushing people onto the water despite mounting instability across the Middle East.
IOM Director General Amy Pope called for governments and donors to respond before another boat goes down.
“We cannot keep treating these deaths as normal,” she said. “No one gets into a boat like that unless they believe there is no other safe way.”
The search for the missing continued as of Sunday, though the odds of finding survivors in the days since the capsizing have grown increasingly remote. For families in Ethiopia, Somalia and beyond, the uncertainty Coissac described — of relatives buried without names, their fates never confirmed — may be the disaster’s most enduring consequence.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/africa/2026/10/12/over-130-migrants-killed-including-children-as-boat-from-djibouti-to-yemen-capsizes/