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Article snippet: BEIRUT, Lebanon — The migrants — average age 16 — were fleeing two desperate places, Yemen. But early Wednesday morning, as they were about to reach land, they were thrown into the Arabian Sea by a boatman they had paid to take them across the water, according to the United Nations migration agency. At least 50 of them drowned. Their attempted flight to a country consumed by war was a measure of the desperation of thousands of people from the Horn of Africa, where successive droughts have led to acute shortages of food and water and to outbreaks of disease. Thousands have fled, usually paying smugglers to take them to Persian Gulf countries in search of work. The route, across the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, takes them through Yemen, one of the world’s most dangerous war zones, where airstrikes and mortar shelling have become routine, and a cholera outbreak has affected more than 400,000 people. And Yemen, too, is on the brink of famine. Nearly seven million residents rely entirely on the World Food Program says. On Wednesday, the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency, said in a statement that it had found 27 survivors from among the people thrown into the sea. They described how their smuggler had tossed them overboard as their boat approached Shabwa, on the Yemeni coast. “The survivors told our colleagues on the beach that the smuggler pushed them to the sea when he saw some ‘authority types’ near the coast,” Laurent de Boeck, the ... Link to the full article to read more