A message from our @IOMchief Swing: pic.twitter.com/lziQOzVmC5 — IOM (@UNmigration) August 10, 2017

In the incident on Wednesday, the smuggler forced more than 120 people into the sea as they approached Yemen's coast, the IOM statement said. As many as 50 Somali and Ethiopian migrants, many of them teenagers, are believed to have been " deliberately drowned " when a human smuggler in charge of a boat forced more than 120 people into the sea off the coast of Yemen, according to the U.N. agency on migration. "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 IOM Yemen Chief of Mission said in the statement. IOM medical personnel treated 27 survivors, who were both male and female, while a further 22 people that had been onboard are reportedly still missing. "This situation is new," he said, adding that "it is the first time" that his agency documented people being forced out of the boats by smugglers before reaching the shores. These are people in much similar situations. Yemen, although wracked by civil war, has become a destination for migrants from the Horn of Africa who are seeking jobs in wealthy Gulf countries, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But some in Somalia aren’t aware of just how bad it is in Yemen.”

After two-and-a-half years of grinding civil war, Yemen is in the throes of a vicious cholera outbreak and a near famine, coalescing into one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet. Read more: A Group of Tunisian Fishermen Blocked a 'Racist' Anti-Migrant Boat From Docking

An estimated 55,000 people have left the Horn of Africa for Yemen since January 2017, according to the IOM, in the hopes of finding better economic opportunities in Gulf countries. De Boeck told Al Jazeera on Thursday that smugglers from Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia work with their counterparts in Yemen to transport people across the Horn of Africa. People have been coming out of Africa along this route into the Middle East since before time was recorded. More than 111,500 refugees and migrants landed on Yemen's shores last year, up from around 100,000 the year before, according to the Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat, a grouping of international agencies that monitors migration in the area.
The United Nations International Organization for Migration reports, over the last two days in two incidents, smugglers have thrown 280 migrants from Ethiopia and other Horn of Africa countries into the sea off the coast of Yemen. More than 50 refugees have drowned with over 30 people still missing.