The number kept climbing all weekend. First the UN’s migration agency counted 109 bodies. Then recovery teams found thirty more. Now the International Organization for Migration says at least 139 people — including 15 children — died when an overcrowded boat capsized off Djibouti, with another 84 still missing. It is one of the deadliest shipwrecks the region has seen in years, and the death toll is not final.
The boat went down on the night of October 8-9, carrying 305 people from Djibouti to Yemen. It never got far. It sank near Guhere, just north of the port town of Obock — a town that has become a staging ground for smugglers’ boats crossing the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
Survivors gave Alexandre Coissac, the IOM’s chief of mission in Djibouti, an account that says almost everything about the trade that sent these people to sea. “Survivors told me that the boat started to sink backwards as soon as they got in it,” Coissac told AFP. It was overloaded far beyond anything it could carry. By the time the sun came up, bodies were washing ashore faster than local authorities could collect them.
Of the 139 dead recovered so far, 52 were men, 42 were women, and 15 were children — nine girls and six boys. Around 82 people survived, all Ethiopian nationals. Djiboutian authorities, overwhelmed by the bodies coming ashore at once, buried many in unmarked common graves. “What is terrible is that they were buried with no names, in a common grave, like in a war situation,” Coissac told the Associated Press. “They all have a mother, a father, and we may never learn what happened.”
The passengers were traveling the Eastern Route, one of the world’s busiest and least reported migration corridors. It runs from the Horn of Africa — Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti itself — across the strait to Yemen, and from there overland toward Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, where construction and domestic work promise wages that can change a family’s fortunes. Smugglers pack migrants into unseaworthy boats for the crossing, which takes only hours but has killed thousands over the years.
The cruel irony of this wreck is where the boat was headed. Yemen, the destination, is living through the worst escalation of fighting between Saudi-backed government forces and the Iran-backed Houthis since a UN-brokered truce largely halted cross-border attacks in 2022. IOM figures show displacement inside Yemen surging from 76,000 in mid-September to 200,000, and more than 3,700 Yemenis have fled by sea to Djibouti since fighting intensified. One current of people is running from the war; another is sailing straight toward it.
“Despite the violence in Yemen, migrants are still making the perilous journeys hoping to make it to the Gulf countries,” the IOM said in its statement — a sentence that reads, on closer look, as the whole story of the Eastern Route in miniature. The push factors have simply become too strong to be weighed against any danger. Poverty, renewed insecurity, and the slow grind of climate change are driving people out of the Horn of Africa. Fighting has broken out in Ethiopia since last month in the biggest escalation of violence since the 2020-2022 Tigray war, and Ethiopia’s government did not respond to requests for comment on the wreck.
Why this matters goes beyond one overloaded boat. Shipwrecks on this route are so frequent that many barely register beyond a line in an IOM report — but 139 dead, with children among them and dozens of families who will never know what happened to their relatives, is a scale that forces the question of why the crossing remains so deadly and so neglected. The vessels are getting more crowded, not less; the smugglers face little risk; and the migrants, mostly young Ethiopians with no other way out, keep boarding. Every new escalation in the region — the war in Yemen, the fighting in Ethiopia — makes the economics of staying unbearable and the odds of surviving the journey no better.
Search and rescue operations are continuing along the Djibouti coast, and the IOM says its teams are on the ground with local authorities providing emergency assistance and medical care to survivors, many of them in shock. The missing are now counted in the dozens. If the pattern of past wrecks holds, some will never be found.
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