Ethiopia: Searching for a Better Life, Young Ethiopians Risk All to Reach Saudi Arabia

Hargeisa, Somalia — “People were fighting over the food, and then the guards would come in and make us lie on our chests. Then they would spray water on us and beat us with different sticks.”

Yasin Omar is a tall, slim man on the cusp of middle age. His face is gaunt, his forehead grooved with injury, his voice quiet and slightly hoarse.

The cause of Yasin’s suffering is neither mysterious nor uncommon. He is one of the hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian migrants who in the past few years have made the perilous journey across the Red Sea in search of a better life in Saudi Arabia.

Like many of his compatriots, Yasin braved the trip because he felt he had no choice. A native of a small village near Dire Dawa, a city in eastern Ethiopia, he struggled for years to support his wife and three children, working intermittently for meagre, uncertain wages as a day-labourer in the countryside.

“It’s hard to live if you don’t even have work,” Yasin explained. “People lose hope. Then you think, whether I die or not, it’s better I try my chance [at migrating].”

Last year, nearly 235,000 people left Ethiopia and headed towards the Red Sea coastline, according to the International Organization for Migration, the UN’s migration agency. The country is Africa’s second largest by population, but it has been wracked in recent years by successive crises, including various ethnic armed conflicts and related economic instability.

Exits from Ethiopia

Much of this Ethiopian exodus has been directed along the so-called “Eastern migration route”, which crosses the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden into Yemen, and ultimately Saudi Arabia. There, and in the other oil-rich economies of the Gulf, migrants like Yasin hope to find work and send money back to their families.

Yet most discover only further suffering. The journey takes them into a dark, transnational economy fuelled by human suffering. Along the route, people smugglers and violent militias prey on their desperation for profit. Many die along the way. And for those lucky enough to reach Saudi Arabia itself, further dangers lurk – including, as Yasin discovered, the terrors of the country’s prison system.

“I never want to experience those things again,” Yasin said, wincing at his painful memories of Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Yet many Ethiopians are living through similar experiences even now. And more are setting off on the hazardous journey to join them every day.

It was in 2021 that Yasin decided to take the plunge and migrate. First, he made his way to Harar, an ancient city about two hours southeast by car from Dire Dawa, which has become a hub for people traffickers and irregular migration.

In Dire Dawa, Yasin got in touch with a dalala, a local word for the middlemen who work for people trafficking networks across the Horn of Africa. Within Ethiopia, dalalas are often disarmingly friendly, full of promises to facilitate people’s journeys across the Red Sea and to help them find work in the Gulf.

Yasin’s dalala promised to help him reach Saudi Arabia, and organised transport for him to cross the border into Somaliland, an autonomous region of northern Somalia. Border crossings usually take place near the town of Wachale, with migrants walking in secret by night through shrub-covered hills. The dalalas show them the paths to follow, which are often the same as those used by smugglers bringing alcohol and khat – a mildly narcotic plant used widely in the region – from Ethiopia into Somaliland.

The lure of a better life

Many migrants from Ethiopia stay for some time in Somaliland, finding jobs in the capital, Hargeisa, and saving up to pay traffickers for the journey to the Gulf. Adam Tsegay, a 26-year-old man from Gondar, a city in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, works in a small grocery store in Hargeisa. At night, he sleeps in the backroom. During the day, he loads and unloads goods from trucks, cleans, and keeps the store tidy.

Since 2023, the Amhara region has been devastated by a conflict between the Ethiopian government and the Fano, a collection of Amhara-nationalist rebels. The Ethiopian army’s counterinsurgency campaign has attracted widespread criticism, with drone strikes often killing civilians, and several documented instances of extrajudicial executions by government troops.

“My mother and sister were killed in retaliation after my brother joined the Fano. One night, they set fire to the bajaj (rickshaw) I used for work, and I knew I would be next,” Adam told The New Humanitarian.

“For me, there is nothing left in Ethiopia. There is work in Saudi Arabia. I know, because those who got there told me. I already earn more here, about $120 a month. [In Saudi Arabia], I can earn three or four times what I was getting in Amhara and build something.”

Many Ethiopian migrants harbour similar hopes of a better life in Saudi Arabia. Getting there, however, is an ordeal.

Once he had crossed the border from Ethiopia into Somaliland, Yasin was handed over to Somali people-smugglers. Unlike the dalalas who do their marketing, the traffickers themselves tend to be cruel.

One former driver for people-smugglers in the Ethiopia-Somaliland borderlands told The New Humanitarian that the traffickers he worked for often beat male migrants and routinely raped female ones. The abuse he witnessed weighed on his conscience, eventually forcing him to quit the job.

Yasin witnessed this cruelty firsthand. Once across the border, he and his fellow migrants were forced to walk through the night to a collection point. There, they were given a meagre portion of plain rice and packed into the back of a pickup truck. They would not eat for another 24 hours.

The smugglers drove them through Somaliland to Las Anod, a city on the border between Somaliland and Puntland that has been at the centre of an armed conflict over contested territory since 2023.

“They made us build a temporary shelter, like a refugee camp,” Yasin explained. Then the traffickers started demanding money – 40,000 birr ($300) per migrant. Those who couldn’t pay were beaten with sticks and told to call their families. Traffickers have been known to send videos of migrants being tortured to their families. They often threaten to kill them in order to extort ransom money.

Once all the migrants – or their families – had paid, they were packed like cattle into the back of a pickup and driven to the port of Bosaso, near the tip of the African Horn. Dozens of migrants were forced into such a tight space that they could barely move their limbs, Yasin recalled. The traffickers beat anyone who complained with wooden sticks.

The sea crossing to Yemen

Then came the crossing. Yasin, squeezed onto a boat with some 70 other migrants, remembers waves smashing against the vessel with terrifying force.

“The water was beating our faces,” he said. After one particularly violent jolt, he realised his forehead was bleeding. But wiping his face with salt-encrusted hands in an attempt to staunch the bleeding only made the wound worse, he said, pointing to the trench-like groove his injuries left behind between his eyes, his forehead, and the bridge of his nose.

Meanwhile, the waves continued to smash against the boat. “All of us were praying, because we thought today we are going to die,” Yasin recalled.

“Thanks be to God, we made it,” he added. But on the shores of southern Yemen, near the port of Aden, they were met by men with guns who separated the men from the women. Sexual slavery is rampant along the Eastern migration route. Yasin doesn’t know what happened to the women in his boat. He never saw them again.

Crossing Yemen took Yasin a hellish month, trekking across deserts and mountain ranges with little food or water. At various points, his group was stopped by one militia or another, who each demanded money. Those who had no cash would have to pay in-kind, by labouring for the gunmen, moving equipment or tending crops. As in Somalia, beatings and abuse were commonplace, Yasin recalled.

“Sometimes, after the beatings, it was difficult even to move for one week”

Eventually, he managed to cross into Saudi Arabia. He and a few other migrants quickly found a job as goatherds for a livestock rancher. But their employer, having promised to pay the migrants at the end of the week, instead reported them to the Saudi immigration authorities after three or four days. Irregular migrants thus appear to serve as a bottomless pool of free labour for unscrupulous businessmen.

Having risked his life to reach Saudi Arabia to find a job, Yasin ended up in jail before he could earn a penny. “The prison was horrific,” he said. “They put 300 of us in a single small cell, without enough food.”

“People were fighting over the food, and then the guards would come in and make us lie on our chests. Then they would spray water on us and beat us with different sticks.”

Yasin also said that more extreme forms of torture were routinely deployed by the guards, as punishment for petty offences like complaining or asking to be allowed to go outside. Prisoners were often taken to a room with a sort of mat covered in sharp spikes on the floor, over which they would be forced to do press-ups. The spikes would pierce their skin with each rep, while the guards laughed, beat them, and called them “donkeys”.

“Sometimes, after the beatings, it was difficult even to move for one week,” said Yasin.

Yasin was held in the prison for nine long months, before being deported back to Ethiopia. In 2024, Saudi Arabia arrested almost a million people for entering the country illegally, according to the country’s interior ministry. Some 576,000 were sent back to their country of origin. But thousands languish in prisons like the one in which Yasin was detained, many of them Ethiopians.

Saudi Arabia has been heavily criticised by human rights groups for its treatment of migrants, both legal and irregular. Legal migrants face various forms of exploitation, including forced labour, excessive working hours, and wage theft, according to Amnesty International.

Irregular migrants face even more severe treatment. In 2023, a report by Human Rights Watch documented numerous “mass killings” of Ethiopian migrants by Saudi border guards. The rights group said the guards had killed hundreds of Ethiopian migrants attempting to cross the border from Yemen, using automatic rifles and explosives.

“The dalalas tell you only good things about Saudi Arabia,” Yasin said. “They never told us about the journey, what we would have to go through. And even when we reached there, things were not at all like they said they would be.”

Edited by Obi Anyadike.