Hundreds of men, women and teenagers clambered out of a boat and through the surf, emerging, exhausted, on the shores of Yemen. The year-old Ethiopian saw men armed with automatic rifles waiting for them on the beach and she clenched in terror. She and other Africans had just endured six hours crammed in a wooden smuggling boat to cross the narrow strait between the Red Sea and the gulf.
When they landed, the traffickers loaded them into trucks and drove them to ramshackle compounds in the desert outside the coastal village of Ras al-Ara. She said she did not have family to ask for money and pleaded for her freedom. Instead, her captors raped her. And they raped the 20 other women with her — for weeks, different men all the time. With its systematic torture, Ras al-Ara is a particular hell on the arduous, mile 1, kilometer journey from the Horn of Africa to oil-rich Saudi Arabia.
Migrants leave home on sandaled feet with dreams of escaping poverty. They trek through mountains and deserts, sandstorms and degree temperatures, surviving on crumbs of bread and salty water from ancient wells. In Djibouti, long lines of migrants descend single file down mountain slopes to the rocky coastal plain, where many lay eyes on the sea for first time and eventually board the boats.
Some find their way safely across war-torn Yemen to Saudi Arabia, only to be caught and tossed back over the border. The lucky ones make it into the kingdom to earn their livings as a servants and laborers.
The European Union began paying Libyan coast guards and militias to stop migrants there, blocking the other main route out of East Africa, through Libya and across the Mediterranean to Europe. The number of Mediterranean crossings plummeted — from , in to just over 56, so far this year. This year, more than , had arrived by the end of September, along with perhaps tens of thousands more the organization was unable to track — or who were buried in graves along the trail.
