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Social Affairs
News: Ethiopians make up overwhelming majority of migrants arriving in Yemen amid worsening regional conditions

https://addisstandard.com/ethiopians-ma ... onditions/

August 12, 2026


Migrants arrive in Yemen following a hazardous sea crossing. (Photo: IOM Yemen)

Addis Abeba – Ethiopian nationals accounted for 91% of the 13,687 migrants who arrived in Yemen in July 2026, making them by far the largest group of migrants recorded entering the conflict-affected country during the month, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

IOM’s Yemen Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM), in its July 2026 dispatch

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released today. said the number of migrant arrivals increased by 3% from June. The migrants entered Yemen through southern coastal landing points and the Yemen-Oman land border crossing.

Of the total arrivals, an estimated 2,584, or about 19%, were under the age of 18, while 2,540, or 18.5%, were women. No children under the age of five were recorded among the incoming migrants during the month, IOM said.

The majority of arrivals were recorded in Abyan, which accounted for 41% of the total, followed by Shabwah and Ta’iz with 26% each, and Al Maharah with 2%. IOM said all migrants arriving in Abyan and Ta’iz had departed from Djibouti, while those arriving in Shabwah came from Somalia and those recorded in Al Maharah entered from Oman.

Somali nationals represented the remaining 9% of arrivals, highlighting the dominance of Ethiopians along the migration routes into Yemen during the reporting period.

Ethiopians also dominate departures

The IOM data also showed that Ethiopian nationals accounted for all 1,649 migrants who departed Yemen in July, with most heading to Djibouti through the Lahj coast and others travelling to Oman through the Al Maharah land border.

Of those departing Yemen, 87% were adult men, 8% adult women and 5% children. IOM noted that a small proportion of the children were under five years old.

The figures come amid a broader humanitarian crisis in Yemen, where IOM reported that more than 22 million people require humanitarian assistance. The agency said conflict, deteriorating maritime security, severe weather and damage to shelters at displacement sites continued to intensify humanitarian needs in July.

According to IOM, the July arrivals were part of an active migration route linking the Horn of Africa with Yemen and onward destinations. The agency’s data indicate that Ethiopians continue to constitute the overwhelming majority of people undertaking this movement.

IOM also reported that it provided direct protection assistance to 1,905 migrants during July, alongside support to internally displaced people, refugees and asylum-seekers. Across its operations, the agency provided services including protection case management, cash assistance, food support and referrals to specialized services.

In July 2026, Addis Standard reported that conflict, insecurity, limited access to protection https://addisstandard.com/?p=58512 and worsening economic conditions were continuing to drive thousands of people from the Horn of Africa onto the Eastern Route toward Yemen and the Gulf, according to a regional overview by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

UNHCR’s Regional Bureau for the Eastern and Southern Africa (RBESA) described the corridor as

one of the world’s most active and dangerous mixed-movement corridors,

warning that migration along the route is rarely a straightforward journey.

According to UNHCR’s July 2026 overview, https://data.unhcr.org/en/documents/details/123415 many migrants and refugees spend months or even years in Somalia and Djibouti before attempting to cross the Red Sea.

Journeys are rarely linear,

the agency said, noting that people may pause, change course or remain in the two countries depending on their access to protection, legal status and resources.

UNHCR said evidence collected along the route indicates that onward movement is often driven by unmet protection needs rather than being “a simple choice,” stressing that timely access to asylum can significantly alter the course of a person’s journey.

The assessment comes against the backdrop of a sharp increase in migration along the corridor. As Addis Standard previously reported, https://addisstandard.com/ethiopia-migr ... on-record/ more than 506,600 outward movements were recorded along the Eastern Route during the latest reporting period, representing an 18% increase from the previous year. The IOM said the route had become the deadliest on record, despite mounting dangers faced by migrants travelling from the Horn of Africa toward Yemen and the Gulf.

According to the IOM, Ethiopian nationals accounted for 97% of all tracked migrants, while 95% cited economic hardship as their primary reason for leaving. The agency also reported that smugglers have increasingly adopted remote routes that bypass official monitoring points and border checkpoints in Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia and Yemen, making movements more difficult to track and exposing migrants to greater risks.

The route has witnessed repeated deadly incidents, https://addisstandard.com/despite-risin ... movements/ including shipwrecks off the Djiboutian coast, deaths from extreme heat in the Obock desert, and killings and abuses in Yemen and Somalia.

Against this backdrop, https://addisstandard.com/tag/irregular-migration/ the latest infographic report identifies several interconnected factors driving continued movement along the Eastern Route.

Foremost among them is conflict, insecurity and political instability. According to UNHCR,

ongoing violence, including forced recruitment, drives people to leave in search of safety.

Insecurity in Ethiopia’s Oromia, https://addisstandard.com/in-depth-[deleted] ... in-oromia/ Amhara https://addisstandard.com/from-training ... ar-police/ and Tigray regions, https://addisstandard.com/tigray-displa ... ssessment/ combined with limited documentation and economic opportunities, continues to push people to leave the country, the report states. It further notes that trafficking networks operating along the Eritrea–Tigray–Addis Abeba–Afar–Djibouti corridor expose migrants, particularly young adults, to extortion and abuse.

It also identifies limited access to protection and legal status as a key driver.




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News: Pentagon acknowledges 153 civilian deaths in Yemen, including Ethiopian migrants killed in US strike

https://addisstandard.com/pentagon-ackn ... e_vignette

August 12, 2026


The aftermath of the 2025 US strike in Yemen

Addis Abeba – The US Pentagon has acknowledged that military operations in Yemen killed 153 civilians and injured another 243 during 2025, including casualties from a strike that killed and wounded Ethiopian migrants at a detention center in Sa’ada, according to a report submitted to Congress.

The figures, disclosed in the Pentagon’s annual civilian-casualty report, mark a sharp increase from previous years, when US military operations were assessed to have killed two civilians in 2024 and one in 2023. The Pentagon attributed the 2025 casualties to three strikes conducted during Operation Rough Rider, the US military campaign against Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen between March and May 2025.

According to CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pentagon-m ... p-hegseth/ the Pentagon assessed that the three strikes were

more likely than not

to have caused civilian harm.

The assessments were based on US intelligence, imagery and publicly available reporting, without site visits or interviews with survivors or witnesses.

The three strikes identified in the assessment occurred on 6 April near Sanaa, where five civilians were killed; 17 April near Ras Isa Port, where 80 civilians were killed and 171 injured; and 28 April near Sa’ada, where 68 civilians were killed.

The target of the 28 April strike was a migrant detention facility in Sa’ada that held African migrants, including Ethiopians detained by Houthi authorities over their irregular immigration status.

In October 2025, Amnesty International said its investigation into the Sa’ada attack provided a reasonable basis to conclude that the US strike constituted an indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a possible war crime. https://addisstandard.com/amnesty-inter ... -in-yemen/

The organization based its findings on interviews with 15 Ethiopian survivors as well as satellite imagery, photographs and videos. Amnesty identified 16 Ethiopian men, most of them in their twenties, among those killed.

Survivors described being trapped inside the facility after the initial explosion, with guards reportedly firing warning shots as detainees attempted to flee before a second strike hit the detention block. Survivors suffered severe injuries, including amputations, nerve damage and head trauma.

One Ethiopian survivor, identified by Amnesty as Hagos, 20, lost a leg in the attack. Another survivor, Desta, lost an eye. Amnesty quoted survivors describing the attack as having left detainees dead, permanently disabled and traumatized.

The Houthi Ministry of Justice and Human Rights said 117 African migrants were being held at the facility when it was struck, with 61 killed and 56 injured. Amnesty, however, said the civilian character of the facility was well established and that humanitarian organizations had regularly visited the compound. It also noted that another detention facility within the same Sa’ada prison complex was hit by a Saudi-led coalition strike in 2022, killing more than 90 detainees.

The Pentagon’s latest disclosure provides a new official accounting of civilian harm in a campaign that had previously faced criticism over the US military’s handling of casualty reports. Fifteen additional incidents in Yemen remain under assessment.

Independent estimates have also put the civilian toll above the Pentagon’s figures. Airwars has estimated that at least 258 civilians may have been killed during Operation Rough Rider.

The campaign began after repeated Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea. The Trump administration said the military operation was intended to degrade the Houthis’ military capabilities and deter further attacks on shipping.

The campaign ended in May 2025 following a US-Houthi agreement brokered by Oman.

Amnesty said survivors deserved

full, effective, and prompt reparations,

including restitution, compensation and rehabilitation, while urging the US to investigate whether the attack amounted to a war crime.

[Zmeselo]

Bacha Debele is petrified by the event that took place in Kenya, recently. Xmdo!





ከኬንያ የጦር ኃይሎች ጠቅላይ ኢታማዦር ሹም ክቡር ጄኔራል ቻርሊስ ኻሪሪ ጋር ተገናኝተን የሁለትዮሽ ውይይት አድርገናል።



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The beginning of the end for Abiy Ahmed.

Protesters burned copies of the book መደመር, as a highly publicized act of political defiance during a wave of anti-government demonstrations in different places in Ethiopia.

[Zmeselo]

At least 27 suspected cargo flights were tracked between 3 July and 8 August, mostly from Turkey , Egypt and Belarus to Sudan & Eritrea , possibly linked to SAF supplies.

~20 landed in Port Sudan , four in Massawa and three at East Qwainat Airbase in SW Egypt . @AfriMEOSINT

[Zmeselo]

Opinion
Prosperity Without People: Ethiopia’s Grand Illusion

By: Red Sea Beacon

https://redseabeacon.com/prosperity-wit ... -illusion/

December 14, 2025

Introduction

Prosperity is neither a slogan nor a skyline. It is not announced through ribbon-cuttings, drone footage, or policy forums polished for foreign audiences. Prosperity begins with a simpler and far more demanding test: can a state guarantee the life, dignity, and safety of its people? Where that test fails, all talk of growth, dynamism, and regional leadership collapses into performance.

It is against this standard that recent pronouncements from Ethiopia’s Institute of Foreign Affairs must be judged—and found wanting. The article titled “Asmara’s Isolation Doctrine” presents itself as sober analysis of Eritrea’s political economy and regional posture. In reality, it is an exercise in projection, repackaging Ethiopia’s own insecurity, inflation, and displacement as evidence of motion and success, while recasting Eritrean sovereignty as pathology.

Eritrea is not the problem the article claims to diagnose. The anxiety driving the piece lies closer to home: Ethiopia’s growing inability to reconcile expansive ambition with a disintegrating social order. Unable to guarantee safety internally, sections of Ethiopia’s policy elite seek reassurance externally—through narratives that sanctify infrastructure, weaponize selective history, and treat sovereignty as obstruction. This essay responds not with counter-slogans, but with first principles: no state that cannot protect its people can credibly preach prosperity to others.

Prosperity as Performance

There is something profoundly indecent about lectures on “prosperity” delivered from a country where inflation consumes wages faster than concrete can be poured, where daily life is structured by fear rather than opportunity, and where armed violence, displacement, and insecurity are routine—yet citizens are invited to admire skyline renderings and ceremonial inaugurations. When prosperity is reduced to optics, it becomes insult.

The IFA article is not policy analysis; it is reassurance marketing. Its purpose is to export an image of order and ascent, while the social foundations of the Ethiopian state erode beneath the surface. This contradiction is no longer subtle. Ethiopia today is not a rising power but a country trapped in inflationary pressure, saturated with internal displacement, and fractured by persistent violence across multiple regions. The state itself admits that it cannot ensure basic safety, nationwide. In such conditions, invoking prosperity is not merely inaccurate—it is grotesque.

Glass towers in Addis Ababa do not restore purchasing power, destroyed by double-digit inflation. They do not rebuild war-damaged regions such as Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, or Benishangul-Gumuz, where insecurity has become structural. Nor do they explain why Ethiopians are fleeing in record numbers, driven into the hands of traffickers and smugglers by despair rather than aspiration.

This is the political economy of let them eat concrete: display infrastructure to mask social collapse, announce growth while trust disintegrates, and rebrand hardship as patience. Prosperity becomes theater, and poverty is reframed as discipline.

Projection

The article accuses Eritrea of “weaponizing poverty.” Coming from Addis Ababa, the charge verges on parody. Ethiopia has normalized militarization as governance, securitized identity, and tolerated mass displacement as a recurring instrument of rule. Scarcity in Ethiopia is not accidental; it is the cumulative outcome of choices that privilege expansionist ambition over internal repair.

Labeling Eritrea as “isolated” serves the same deflective purpose. Eritrea is not isolated; it is uncaptured. What troubles Ethiopian elites is not Eritrea’s economic condition, but Eritrea’s refusal to subordinate its sovereignty to Ethiopia’s chronic instability. Eritrea has declined to become an economic hinterland, a security buffer, or a demographic overflow zone for a state still struggling to contain itself.

When Addis Ababa speaks of “regional integration,” it often implies Eritrean ports without Eritrean sovereignty, Eritrean coastline without Eritrean consent, and Eritrean stability as a shock absorber for Ethiopian dysfunction. That is not cooperation. It is the externalization of failure.

Claims of Ethiopian “dynamism” collapse under scrutiny. Ethiopian Airlines remains a strong enterprise, but it is increasingly deployed as diplomatic symbolism rather than proof of broad-based prosperity. Telecom liberalization remains politically constrained and socially exclusionary. GERD, while an engineering achievement, has been instrumentalized geopolitically rather than translated into internal equity. None of these deliver the essence of prosperity: predictability, safety, dignity, and social trust.

A society is not prospering when parents fear sending children to school, when identity determines survival, and when violence is not episodic but systemic. Prosperity is not GDP theater; it is the ability of ordinary people to plan their lives without fear.

Sovereignty and the Red Sea Obsession

The article’s treatment of migration exposes its moral asymmetry. Eritrean migration is weaponized as proof of state failure, while Ethiopia’s own hemorrhaging of people is rendered incidental. Hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians are fleeing not only across land borders, but across the high seas of the Indian Ocean. Many perish anonymously along trafficking routes stretching from the Horn to Yemen and beyond.

This phenomenon is neither marginal nor obscure; it is widely known among migration authorities and humanitarian agencies. Yet it remains absent from the IFA narrative because acknowledging it would puncture the image of Ethiopian prosperity being so carefully curated.

The most destabilizing element of the article is its casual normalization of Ethiopia’s Red Sea fixation. Invocations of Aksumite history, population size, and selective readings of international law do not generate entitlement. UNCLOS guarantees negotiated access, not ownership, and certainly not coercion. Demographic pressure and economic ambition do not override sovereignty. Eritrea’s ports are not Ethiopia’s safety valve for policy failure.

Eritrea does not reject prosperity. It rejects prosperity without sovereignty—prosperity built on debt dependency, donor indulgence, elite enclaves, and performative infrastructure. It rejects a model that collapses the moment external financing dries up. Eritrea’s path may be austere and unglamorous, but it is rooted in strategic autonomy rather than illusion.

Conclusion

The central failure of Ethiopia’s prosperity narrative is not exaggeration, but inversion. It confuses infrastructure with well-being, spectacle with stability, and ambition with capacity. It speaks of growth while inflation erodes livelihoods, celebrates expansion while millions are displaced, and preaches integration while exporting insecurity, migration, and death across land routes and the Indian Ocean.

Ethiopians are not fleeing because they reject prosperity; they are fleeing because prosperity has failed them. Their deaths at sea and erasures on migration routes are the human audit of a state that has lost control of its social contract.

Against this backdrop, Eritrea’s insistence on sovereignty is not isolationism—it is self-preservation. Eritrea does not reject prosperity; it rejects prosperity without people, growth without safety, and integration without consent. What unsettles Addis Ababa’s policy class is not Eritrea’s poverty, but Eritrea’s refusal to conform to a regional order built on dependency and permanent instability.

Prosperity cannot be declared at conferences or manufactured through concrete and cameras. It is earned through security, dignity, and trust between a state and its citizens. Until Ethiopia meets that standard, its sermons about Eritrea—and the Horn—will remain what they are: a polished fiction delivered over unresolved collapse.

And no amount of concrete can bury that truth.