Figure caption, Watch: Inside a camp for Yemeni refugees in DjiboutiByFrank GardnerSecurity correspondentReporting fromMarkazi camp, Obock, DjiboutiIbrahim 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."
Image source, Ed Habershon/ BBCImage caption, Ibrahim Issa escaped on his fishing boat with family and several goatsAs 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."
