The overwhelming majority of deaths — more than 2,700 — happened on sea routes, namely the Mediterranean Sea, which extends from the shores of Syria, Turkey and Egypt on the east to Spain and Morocco on the west.
The number of deaths, up more than 60 percent since 2020, showcases the increased economic desperation and grinding life conditions felt in Middle Eastern and North African countries over the past few years.
Ongoing wars in Yemen and Syria, collapsing economies in Lebanon and Egypt, and conflict and poverty in Libya and other North African countries have pushed people to seek refuge in Europe, spurred by the belief that there is no life to be had in their countries of origin. Numbers are likely to continue to climb this year as the region is further racked by economic ruin, poverty, wars and severe climate change.
More than half the Mediterranean’s victims, 1,330 people, were “roughly identified.” Two-thirds hailed from Africa and about a quarter originated from Arab states in the Middle East, the report said.
More than 90 percent of people dying on the route remain unidentified, said Koko Warner, the director of IOM’s Global Data Institute.
The apex of such deaths came in 2015 and 2016, when Europe was flooded with migrants from much of the MENA region, especially from war-torn Syria. More than 4,000 died in the Mediterranean in 2015, and more than 5,000 in 2016.
Bodies regularly washed up on Turkish shores at the time. They were buried in “kimsesiz” cemeteries — a Turkish term meaning “people without an ID,” which also translates to “people without people.”
While the majority of incidents in the eastern Mediterranean tend to occur between Turkey and Greece, two shipwrecks off the Lebanese coast cost at least 40 lives, the report said. Lebanon, long awash with so much luxury that the country once boasted it was the “Paris of the Middle East,” has been hit by a multitude of economic and political crises and has struggled to deal with the spillover of the war in neighboring Syria. The dire economic conditions during the past two years have forced Lebanese to join Syrians on the boats bound to Europe.
Land routes also posed peril in North Africa, which recorded 203 deaths, particularly in the treacherous Sahara Desert crossing. In the Middle East, there were 867 recorded deaths in the Horn of the Africa-Yemen crossing — the majority losing their lives on routes between war-battered Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The majority of victims are believed to be Ethiopian, the report said.
“Violence has been the main cause of death of migrants on Middle Eastern land routes covered by this briefing in 2022, constituting 96 percent of the total deaths recorded,” the report said, adding that scarcity of official data and limited access suggests numbers are likely much higher.
correction
A previous version of this story stated that “nearly half” of the deaths recorded on the Mediterranean were “roughly identified.” The actual figure amounts to more than half of the victims. The story has been corrected.
