Hawa Mohamed Osman also fled her hometown to escape the gunmen. Last year, one boat foundered off Bosaso and bodies washed up on the shore for days afterwards. Earlier this year, an American naval ship, the USS Saturn, recovered some of the 180 bodies from a smuggling ship that sank nearby. Still, business is business. Hawa Osman says she has already helped 4,000 people leave and despite the many deaths at sea, They still want to go, so I ll help them.
Life is better in Yemen, even in a refugee camp, than in Somalia.
If they reach Yemen. The smugglers are a tough no-nonsense bunch of seafarers who left their jobs as fishermen to enter the much more lucrative trade in human cargo. Their crews are armed and dangerous and try to pack as many people into each small boat as possible, artificially hightening the sides of the vessels by stretching plastic sheeting around the sides. That also makes the boats highly unstable in the choppy waters of the straits. The boats leave on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, aiming to reach the Yemen coast during the early morning or at the end of the week, which they believe is the best time to avoid detection by prowling coast guard vessels.