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Airstrike Kills Dozens of Somali Migrants Off Yemen’s Coast Airstrike Kills Dozens of Somali Migrants Off Yemen’s Coast
(about 5 hours later)
SANA, Yemen — More than 30 Somali migrants in a vessel off Yemen were killed on Friday in what Yemeni security officials said was an airstrike by a Saudi-led military coalition. SANA, Yemen — More than 30 Somali migrants, including children, were killed in the Red Sea on Friday when a military helicopter opened fire on their boat, according to Yemeni and United Nations officials.
Joel Millman, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration in Geneva, said that 31 Somali migrants had been killed and that 80 others were hospitalized. He could not confirm what had happened to the boat. The boat’s Yemeni captain was shot in the leg, but piloted the boat toward the Yemeni port city of Al Hudaydah, where rescue workers were so overwhelmed that they put the dead in coolers normally used for fish, Dawood Fadal, the head of security at the port, said by phone.
Security officials in the Red Sea port city of Al Hudaydah said that the boat had been struck before dawn on Friday and that it had taken hours to bring the migrants to the port. The officials said that 33 migrants had been killed, 29 wounded and 74 others detained after being brought to shore. “Our hospitals did not have room for them so we had to put them in the fish fridges,” he said. “Can you imagine what that looks like?”
It was unclear where the migrants had been heading. Some African migrants use the Red Sea to reach Egypt or Sudan, with hopes of continuing toward Europe. Others land in Yemen, despite years of war there, hoping to enter wealthier Persian Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia. But war in Yemen has made those trips more dangerous. Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who control the territory around the port, attributed the attack to the Saudi-led military coalition that has bombarded the region for two years. A spokesman for the coalition did not respond to requests for comment, but Saudi officials have accused Iran of smuggling weapons to the Houthis by sea and vowed to stop it.
Two years ago, Saudi Arabia and a coalition of other Arab countries began an air campaign against Yemeni rebels, known as the Houthis, who seized the capital in October 2014, toppling the internationally recognized government. More than 10,000 people have been killed in the war, and rights organizations have accused the coalition of bombing civilian targets, and the rebels of shelling civilian neighborhoods. The pre-dawn attack, about 30 miles off the Yemeni coast, turned a desperate journey by migrants already fleeing a war zone into a scene of horror, with dead and dismembered bodies piled atop one another just steps from their loved ones in the small wooden boat.
The security officials said it was the Saudi-led coalition that attacked the migrant boat on Friday. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the news media. A spokesman for the coalition did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It also drew attention to the often overlooked illegal human traffic in the waters between Yemen and the Horn of Africa, where poverty and violence in Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia have pushed hundreds of thousands of people to take risky sea journeys in hopes of better lives.
More than a quarter of a million Somalis are registered as refugees in Yemen, a large share of the more than 880,000 around the world, according to the United Nations. The waterways they use, the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, also host major shipping lanes and lots of military traffic, increasing the chances that naval forces will cross paths with migrants, whose vessels can be hard to differentiate from those of smugglers.
This was not the first time Somali refugees were killed during a Yemen conflict. In May 1994, during a brief civil war, hundreds of Somali refugees died when their camp was caught in crossfire. Shabia Mantoo, a spokeswoman for the United Nations refugee agency in Yemen, said that despite years of war and economic collapse in Yemen, the country hosts more than 255,000 refugees from Somalia and took in 117,000 new refugees and migrants in 2016.
While some of the new arrivals remain in Yemen, others hope to sneak into its richer Persian Gulf neighbors, like Saudi Arabia, to look for work or to make a transit stop on their way to Europe.
Many migrants are abused or exploited by smugglers along the way, and some arrive in Yemen without knowing it is a country at war.
“Not only do they arrive in a war zone, but they are also vulnerable to unscrupulous traffickers and smugglers,” Ms. Mantoo said.
The boat attacked on Friday had launched illegally into the Red Sea from Yemen’s west coast, heading toward Sudan, from where its Somali passengers hoped to make their way to Egypt, Libya and eventually Europe, said Mr. Fadal, the Yemeni port official.
But before dawn, it came under fire. Some survivors said a battleship struck it first, then a helicopter.
“I took cover in the belly of the ship,” said Ibrahim Ali Zeyad, a Somali who survived the attack. “People were falling left and right. Everyone kept screaming, ‘We are Somali! We are Somali!’”
But the shooting continued for what felt like half an hour.
“The helicopter was right over us and it had these huge lights on,” he said. “They just kept shooting.”
Al-Hassan Ghaleb Mohammed, a Yemeni trafficker who was aboard, told The Associated Press that when the helicopter attacked, the migrants held up flashlights to show that they posed no threat and the helicopter stopped firing. But dozens of passengers were already dead.
Mr. Fadal said that there were 145 Somalis on board and that 32 were killed, including at least 10 women and five children. Thirty others were wounded; 73 survived without injury; and 10 were missing.
He shared photos from the port, showing bodies and tattered clothing strewn about the boat and laid out on the pavement.
After piloting the boat close enough to the port for rescue crews to reach it, the boat’s Yemeni captain bled to death, Mr. Fadal said.
In Geneva, Mohammed Abdiker, emergencies director at the International Organization for Migration, said 42 bodies had been recovered. He called the attack “totally unacceptable” and said responsible combatants should have confirmed the identities of the boat’s passengers “before firing on it.”
Mr. Fadal said the attack on Friday was one of many in recent weeks off the coast of Yemen. An attack on a Yemeni fishing boat the night before had killed seven fishermen, he said, and another recent attack on two fishing boats killed 32 people.
“To the ships, these boats look like they are the enemy,” he said of the warships in the Red Sea. “But that is a totally unjustified fear. The rebels don’t attack enough for them to be so scared, and they can easily tell that these are fishermen or migrants.”
Also on Friday, a shelling attack on a mosque in a military base in Marib Province killed 27 people and injured 95, according to Mohammed Al Qubaty, the head of the Marib General Hospital. Military officials accused the Houthis rebels of targeting the base.