The Abyan coast beach in Aden, Yemen, January 30, 2024 (Mhm500mhm, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0) [file photo]
Ethiopian migrants living in Yemen have appealed for international help, writing to DW Amharic that air strikes and shortages of food, water and medicine have left them in grave danger.
"We Ethiopian migrants living in Yemen are in very severe humanitarian, health and security problems," they wrote in a letter to the broadcaster, which DW Amharic reported on Thursday. The letter said that "because of the war that is getting worse in Yemen and the repeated air strikes, migrants are living in fear and in great danger," and that many cannot get enough food, clean water, medicine or health care.
"Migrants are people, not a political issue. To save their lives, they need the attention and support of the world community," the letter said. The migrants asked for news coverage and asked Ethiopians living in other countries to carry their message "to the United Nations and humanitarian organizations." They also asked DW to pass their appeal to Ethiopian scholars, religious leaders and Ethiopians abroad. The letter said the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, had left Yemen in 2025, and that people who used to receive humanitarian and medical help from the agency had been left in hardship. DW reporter Shewaye Legesse spoke by phone with Kedir Bakalcho, who described himself as the community's foreign affairs coordinator.
An estimated 11,841 migrants arrived in Yemen in September, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Its Displacement Tracking Matrix recorded 6,209 arrivals along the coast of Abyan governorate, 2,985 along the coast of Shabwah, 2,268 along the coast of Ta'iz and 379 across the land border with Oman in Al Maharah.
The agency said the total number of migrants moving to and from Yemen fell by one percent from August, largely because the escalation of conflict along Yemen's West Coast disrupted boat movements and limited its teams' ability to collect information safely. Its teams intermittently lost access to monitoring points in Ta'iz, so flows there may not have been fully recorded, the IOM said. An estimated 1,320 migrants left Yemen in September, 87 percent of them by boat toward the Horn of Africa.
Yemen Shabab TV, citing the IOM figures on X, said 94 percent of September's new arrivals were Ethiopian and 6 percent Somali, and that men made up 70 percent, women 15 percent and children 15 percent. The channel said 134,099 African migrants had arrived in Yemen since the start of the year, most of them Ethiopians.
On October 11, the South24 news site reported on X, citing a local source, that a drone "likely Houthi" had struck a bus carrying Ethiopian migrants in the Harad area of Arma district in Shabwah governorate. Mereja could not independently confirm the report or the number of casualties.
On the other side of the Bab el-Mandeb, Djibouti is facing "overlapping emergencies," the IOM said on October 6. Alexandre Coissac, head of the agency's mission in Djibouti, told journalists in Geneva that the agency had recorded more than 20,000 journeys from Ethiopia since September 10, as migrants on the eastern route continue to head for Yemen in the hope of finding work in the Gulf. Another 539 Ethiopian migrants had arrived from Yemen on their way home, while more than 3,700 refugees fleeing Yemen had reached Djibouti in three weeks.
"Djibouti is therefore confronting movement in both directions: people fleeing Yemen are arriving as refugees, migrants continue travelling towards Yemen, and other migrants are returning," Coissac said, according to UN News. He said most migrants bound for Yemen were unaware of the grave situation there as fighting between government and Houthi forces intensifies. Between September 20 and 30, more than 3,000 stranded migrants were seen along migration routes in Djibouti, facing dehydration, exhaustion and shortages of food and water, and the IOM received reports of migrants dying in the desert near the border with Ethiopia, he said.
At least 109 migrants, including 15 children, died and more than 116 were missing when a boat bound for Yemen capsized off Djibouti during the night of October 8, and all of the more than 80 survivors were Ethiopian, the IOM said on October 11.
The IOM said on October 12 that more than 139 people, including children, had died at sea in the disaster. Xinhua reported on Friday that at least 139 migrants died and 84 remain missing, and that the boat had been carrying 305 people, of whom only 82 survived.
Inside Yemen, the IOM is also appealing for money to help Yemeni families displaced by the latest escalation. In a post on X on Thursday, IOM Yemen described a man named Ahmed who had fled his home for the fourth time and traveled for more than two days with his family to reach Ma'rib, and who now has no home, no income and not enough food.
The IOM said 3,793 Yemeni arrivals were reported in Djibouti in September amid the escalation of fighting along Yemen's west coast.
Sources
- DW Amharic, appeal of Ethiopians in war-torn Yemen, Shewaye Legesse, October 15, 2026
- IOM DTM Yemen, Flow Monitoring, September 2026
- UN News, Djibouti faces overlapping emergencies, October 6, 2026
- Yemen Shabab TV on X, IOM September figures
- South24 on X, drone strike on bus carrying Ethiopian migrants
- IOM Yemen on X, displacement appeal
- IOM, Djibouti shipwreck, October 11, 2026
- IOM Yemen, people desperate to flee conflict while thousands arrive, October 12, 2026
- Xinhua, experts urge action on root causes of Red Sea humanitarian crisis, October 16, 2026