Perils of the Sea

As fishing skiffs cruise through Yemeni waters, seagulls aren’t the only thing circling overhead. When Saudi-led coalition helicopters patrol the coast, sailors routinely wave white cloths and lift their hands in surrender—sometimes to no avail.

Now when Yemeni fishermen go out to sea, they are wading into war. And with hungry mouths to feed at home, men like Ali Mohammed make sure to say goodbye to their children each morning before heading to their boats. After all, they do not know if they are coming back.

As Yemen has struggled with war on shore, one of the world’s largest illegal fishing operations has flourished off the coast of Yemen, turning fishermen into targets. Boats have violated international boundaries, overfished, and have been accused of smuggling arms shipments to Iran-backed Houthis. The increasingly frequent presence of Iranian fishing boats in Yemeni waters have outraged many of Yemen’s 90,000 fishermen. For those fishermen and the half-million people employed by the industry, foreign fishermen do more than threaten their livelihoods. They also increase the danger that their Yemeni counterparts are mistaken as smugglers or combatants.

Fishery production, the country’s second largest export industry before war began in 2015, is just 35 percent of what it was before the war, according to some estimates. Starvation looms,  and Yemen faces the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. Consequences are not only economic: fear, combined with a lack of monitoring and law enforcement, have increased illegal fishing practices and harassment. Yemen’s coasts face destruction and over-exploitation, and the men who venture out to sea to feed their families face imprisonment.

According to one Hodeidah fisherman, they face a bitter choice: starve to death at home, or die from being bombed at sea.

This article is part of the CSIS Middle East Program series Mezze: Assorted Stories from the Middle East.