Siidow is a 67-year-old Somali man who decided to flee his country with his wife Maryam five years ago. The reason why this fruit and vegetable farmer decided to leave his eight children and five grandchildren in a town of Afgooye was that the local militiaman raided his home in central Somalia.
He and his wife travelled to the port of Bossaso, situated in the Gulf of Aden, in a hope to be smuggled into Yemen and later on to Saudi Arabia. They thought a life would be better there. They saw Yemen as a promised land.
As Siidow remembers now, he has to pay US$100 for the crossing to the armed smugglers. He and his wife were on a boat with more than 300 people, though the boat was designed to carry a maximum of 60 people. Some hundreds of meters from the coast from Yemen passangers were forced into the sea to swim. Some of them died of exhaustion. Siidow and his wife were lucky to stay alive.
In Yemen Siidow found a job and after some time he saved money enough to get them to Saudi Arabia, where they were caught by a police and thrown back to Somalia. There, however, they got into the care of the UNHCR, in Galkayo. The whole family of Siidow is now reunited there.
> In the first 10 months of this year, at least 62,000 people arrived on the Yemeni coast on smugglers' boats. More than 430 people have drowned or are missing and feared dead. Somalis are escaping conflict and persecution within their own country. <
No comments:
Post a Comment