Ben is based in South Africa and also works on The Telegraph's Global Health Security team. He spent five years in Kabul covering the Afghanistan war, five years as Defence Correspondent in London, and four years in Islamabad 6:00am BST The fishing village of Khor Angar does not look like a site on one of the world’s main maritime migrant smuggling routes.

Nestled between the desert and the Red Sea, the whitewashed buildings seem to slumber in the searing heat and give no indication of the life-and-death drama witnessed along this coastline.

Maps claim there is a road from the town of Obock 40 miles away, but the occasional cars and bikes must instead venture over baked sand and mudflats to get there. Camels watch as they pass.

But if you scan the remote beaches along this stretch of northern Djibouti’s coastline clues to the scale of its intercontinental human traffic emerge. Half buried in the sand are abandoned shoes, clothes and even identity documents.

The dropped personal possessions are reminders of hurried embarkations in the surf, or of terrible panicked capsizings in a perilous strait known as the ‘Gate of Tears’. On some beaches there are mass graves of those who have drowned, marked out by stones among the sand dunes.

Stones mark out mass graves of those who drowned Signs of human trafficking are visible on the remote beaches of northern Djibouti’s coastline The dangers were illustrated earlier this month, when a boat carrying more than 300 migrants sank near Obock on its way to Yemen. At least 139 people drowned, including 15 children. There were 700 drownings or people lost at sea on the route in 2025.

“The boats don’t stop, day or night,” the local coastguard chief told the Telegraph as he looked out at the waterway, walkie-talkie in hand, one day earlier this month.

The chief, who declined to be named, pointed to skiffs and fishing boats moored in a lagoon outside his outpost, that he had confiscated from smugglers and traffickers.

The world has become familiar with the 18-mile-wide Bab el-Mandeb strait as one of the globe’s most congested and strategically important maritime choke points.

Sitting to the south of the Suez Canal, the East-West artery flowing through the strait carries approximately 12 to 15 percent of global maritime trade.

What is less well known is that there is also a migration superhighway running across the strait, linking Africa via Djibouti to Yemen and the Gulf beyond.

Identification documents scatter the beaches of Khor Angar The personal possessions are reminders of hurried embarkations or of panicked capsizings Many tens of thousands of people cross the waterway each year and while Yemeni refugees fleeing the Houthi offensive have made headlines in recent weeks, the majority of those braving the waterway are heading the other way.

This maritime migrant route out of Africa has recently been busier than all the crossings across the Mediterranean into Europe, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

The IOM estimates there were nearly 64,000 crossings across the Bab el-Mandeb in the first four months of 2026, compared with a total of just over 23,000 across the Western, Eastern and central routes of the Med.

The vast majority heading east are Ethiopians so desperate to find work in the Gulf that they are prepared to trek through war-torn Yemen, which has been tipped into a humanitarian crisis by its civil war.

The IOM recorded some 202,000 migrant trips into Djibouti from Ethiopia in 2025 and by early October, the figure for 2026 had already hit 177,000.

The reignited war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region is expected to increase the numbers wanting to leave, yet the exodus is also being held up by escalating fighting along Yemen’s coast between Houthis and the government. Fewer are now able to get across the strait.

Djibouti’s coastline has become one of the world’s main maritime migrant smuggling routes That bottleneck has left a build-up of people, says Mylaèle Negga, Djibouti spokeswoman for the IOM.

She says: “Most of them want to find work in Saudi Arabia or other Gulf countries, but some of them will also try to use that route to go all the way to Europe.

“The crossing is incredibly busy and I think what we are saying is it’s not just the crossing, but it’s also the number of people who are entering Djibouti and what that means.

“A lot of migrants have been used to taking this route, but now, because of the situation [in Yemen], they are having to take different routes.”

“It’s creating a migration bottleneck. You have a lot of people who are being stranded inside Djibouti, or they are crossing very dangerous routes.

“As much as the situation with arrivals from Yemen is difficult and requires a response, now there’s this other situation.”She said many of the Ethiopians passing through were not put off by the worsening situation in Yemen.

The ferry provides a vital transport link between Obock and the capital and is also used by refugees travelling to mainland Djibouti Migrants from the Horn of Africa have reported being held captive, being kidnapped for ransom and facing forced conscription by the warring parties during their trips across Yemen.

Ms Negga says: “When we meet them, we tell them there’s a war on. But the ones that are on their way to Yemen, they are not deterred by that.

“They are not being able to cross the way that they were before, but they are still trying. The problem is it’s becoming much more complicated and much more difficult for them.

“We have also had some people go and find a job in Yemen. They think they will find it easier, which tells you something about the situation in Ethiopia.”

Zinab Gebrekristos, a 20-year-old from Adwa in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, is one of the 10s of thousands who have tried to make the crossing this year. Her boat sank in late March, but she survived.

“I wanted to leave because of the problems in our country. Things are getting worse, so we migrate. There is no peace. Because of the hardship, I wanted to be able to support myself and change my family’s life,” she later told her rescuers.

An abandoned shoe, one of many personal items washed up on the beach on the notorious trafficking route After paying $320, she was robbed of her possessions and then left to wait on the Djibouti coast for three days, before she and more than 300 others were loaded onto a boat.

A storm was building as they boarded and to subdue the panicking passengers, the smugglers splashed them with petrol. The vessel soon began taking on water and then capsized. She said: “Many people died right in front of our eyes – friends and family members.

“Their bodies weren’t even found because the boat sank. People were struggling to get out, but they didn’t know which way to go. In the chaos, people were falling into the sea without knowing it.”Abdourahman Sultan also took a chance on getting to Yemen on a smugglers’ boat. But hopes of a new life vanished when he was badly burned in a gas explosion at the restaurant where he was working.

Instead he decided to return from Yemen and said he would persuade others against taking the journey across the Red Sea.

He said: “After this, I won’t take that path, and I’ll advise people not to take it. If I see people who want to set off, I’ll advise them against it. I’ll show them my wounds to prove to them that the path is no good.”