Yemenis flee across Red Sea as Houthis and Saudi-backed forces escalate war

Ibrahim Issa, 50, is from the Yemeni coastal town of Dhubab, right on the front lines of the war between Yemen's Houthis and the Saudi-backed pro-government forces fighting them.

Today he sits, surrounded by his family, on a tarpaulin spread over a sandy floor inside a vast open-sided warehouse at Markazi camp in Obock, northern Djibouti, packed with Yemeni families who have fled by boat across the narrow Bab al-Mandab Strait.

After their sea crossing, Yemeni refugees have made their way by truck and on foot to this camp, jointly administered by the government and the UN.

"How could I just sit there when my kids are screaming and shaking in terror?" says Ibrahim Issa. "When the sound of the planes start, and the kids hear the planes, they begin shouting and screaming. As parents it is our responsibility, what can you do when you see this? That is why we fled, to save them."

As a fisherman, Ibrahim Issa already owned a boat large enough to bring out his family from Yemen.

He even brought several of the family's goats which I can now see nibbling at scraps nearby, foraging amidst the discarded canisters of cooking gas and empty plastic bottles. Some families have been able to bring small bundles of possessions with them from Yemen – one family has even brought a "jeraak", a tall metal shisha pipe – but others have arrived, exhausted, in just the clothes they left in.

In just the last few days more than 3,000 refugees have arrived here from Yemen, many entire families. The UN estimates that in all, more than 120,000 Yemenis have been displaced by the sudden surge in fighting along Yemen's Red Sea coast.

This month, the country's Houthis, who had already seized most of the populated parts of Yemen years ago, made a lightning dash down the coast towards Bab al-Mandab, the narrow, maritime chokepoint where the southern Red Sea flows into the Gulf of Aden and the wider Indian Ocean.

Saudi Arabia, which backs the internationally recognised government of Yemen, has responded with hundreds of air strikes along the flat, coastal plain where the Houthis are now digging in. The Houthis have also launched hundreds of drones and missiles at cities and infrastructure in south-western Saudi Arabia.

"We don't care which side it is that's attacking," is the message I got loud and clear in Arabic from everyone here I spoke to. "It's the bombs falling all around us that have caused us to flee."

Djibouti, a tiny former French colony that sits just across the water from Yemen, has made it clear it has no intention of involving itself in the war between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government.

And yet Djibouti is one of the most militarised nations in Africa. Since 2003, the US has run a huge multinational base here, Camp Lemonnier, once home to the French Foreign Legion. China too has a major base here, its largest military presence on the Indian Ocean and recently upgraded.

Back in Markazi camp, one of those I spoke to is Qassim Abraham Abssy. Once also a fisherman, his identity card shows him to be 100 years old.

"What led us to come here?" he asks rhetorically.

"It was the planes. The sounds of the planes, boom! That's what made us flee, for the sake of our children. It burns ours hearts. We don't know which side they are from. They are bombing everywhere, because the Houthis are everywhere, in the mountains, in the roads. A plane comes, bombs everywhere."

Outside in the blazing 37C heat, close to the neat lines of tents supplied by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, I met Mohammed Abdullarim from Aden, a 63-year-old former tour guide old enough to have been born when Aden was still a British protectorate.

Unlike the new arrivals, Mohammed has been here since 2015. He fled to Djibouti soon after the fighting first flared up between the Houthis and the government of the now-ousted President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi.

He has been at the camp ever since but suddenly, as we were talking, the sadness of what is happening to his country overwhelmed him and he turned his head away, choking back tears.

"Most of the people here are in the worst condition, inside the tents here. I am very touched, I'm crying for these people, for my people, for their suffering. I want our voices to be heard by the NGOs and the Djibouti government. And I'm thankful to them for accepting us."

How long will they have to stay here? That depends, of course, on the fighting. Yemen has been wracked by a horrific civil war that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions since 2014.

A shaky, UN-brokered 2022 truce between the Saudis and the Houthis has broken down spectacularly in recent months, with the two sides trading missiles, drones and air strikes.

Yemen's war may be a remote one to most people but the effect of choking off Saudi Arabia's oil exports through the Bab al-Mandab Strait are well publicised. But as ever, it is often the human cost that goes unnoticed.

Sitting beside his wife on their tarpaulin, amid the cacophony all around them, Qassim Abssy the fisherman is wary of leaving the safety of Djibouti: "If the war continues then we're not going back because we have peace here."

His wife, Aisha Abdulkadir Mohammed, agrees. "We are willing to go back in peace if peace returns to our country, and we are praying to God that peace does return. All we need is peace, even for our children's future, they get safety first, then food, water and an education.

"As you see we just fled with our clothes, and left everything behind, because [in Yemen] there is no peace."