Saudi Arabia was Tigrit’s dream: a place where she could find work as a cleaner or maid, and send money back to her husband and young daughter in Ethiopia. Now, like hundreds of thousands of East Africans who have left home and travelled across the Red Sea in search of a better life, she finds herself stranded in Yemen instead.

“We’re stuck. I don’t have food or money for phone credit to call home. I don’t have anything,” she said, sitting on the floor in a building site with no electricity or running water on the edge of the desert.

Despite – or rather because of – the war that has raged for six years, desperate migrants and shrewd traffickers have been keen to exploit Yemen’s lawlessness as the EU has cracked down on Mediterranean crossings from Turkey and Libya. Far away from western border controls, by 2019 the Gulf of Aden became the busiest maritime migration route in the world, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Twenty-year-old Tigrit has been sharing a room for the last three weeks with Oko, another young woman from Ethiopia’s Tigray region. The pair are doing their best to keep their lodgings clean: the room contains only some sleeping mats and cooking utensils, but the window has no glass, and dust, dirt and rubbish from the outside blows in.

They are the only women, but around 20 young men from Ethiopia and Somalia who have fled poverty or conflict are also milling around the building site in the town of Ataq, in government-controlled central Yemen. Unable to continue to the Saudi border because of frontline fighting and coronavirus road closures, but with no money to get home, they too hope this is just a temporary stop.

While the IOM has organised regular repatriation flights in the past from the southern city of Aden, Covid-19 means that the Ethiopian government has refused to take returnees.