Lonely graves, scattered bones: the stark reality of one of the most overlooked and fastest-growing migration routes

Thousands of desperate migrants die in the desert and at sea, or fall victim to murderers and kidnappers, as they make their way along the ‘eastern corridor’ from Ethiopia to Saudi Arabia

The bones lie scattered across the desert floor, close to the beach. Along with some tattered clothes, a single banknote and a sun-bleached identity card, they are the only remains of a young Ethiopian man who risked everything for the chance of a better life in Saudi Arabia.

Wearing a surgical mask, Dr Youssouf Moussa, from the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), gathers them into a bundle that he buries in a makeshift grave. The site’s coordinates will be shared with the authorities in Obock, a small port town in Djibouti. But since the local graveyard is almost full, they will probably remain here in this lonely patch of desert a few miles to the north.

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