Known as tahriib, they are clandestine travellers seeking to escape conflict, poverty and the effects of climate change. Over the past decade, their journeys across the Gulf of Aden have become increasingly chaotic, a microcosm of the forces driving worldwide flows of human traffic.
Between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, this stretch of water separates the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. No other place on earth has witnessed more cycles of conflict, forcing so many people into successive rotations in such a small space. Today, contraflows of migrants and refugees move through a labyrinth of ever-more-dangerous routes, exchanging insecurities, jumping between continents, from one battlefield to another. They criss-cross Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, a human shuffle in which the odds are never favourable.
A generation of young men and women has been seduced by a growing network of middlemen, promising jobs and a better future elsewhere. Promises that have, in turn, fuelled a new model of people trafficking, drawing the tahriib into a world in which there is often complete disregard for life.