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Missing migrants

Asia and the Eastern Route

The Missing Migrants Project of the International Organization for Migration recorded more than 3,000 deaths during migration in Asia in 2025, with 1,540 Afghans among them. On the Eastern Route between the Horn of Africa and Yemen, 922 deaths were recorded, against 558 in 2024.

Asia · Horn of Africa to Yemen

Annual deaths and disappearances in Southern, South-eastern, Eastern and Western Asia combined, 2014 to 2025, drawn from the open Missing Migrants Project dataset as updated in late September 2026. Recent years are revised as late reports arrive, so the last bar can differ from the totals quoted in the text.

Annual deaths and disappearances in Southern, South-eastern, Eastern and Western Asia combined, 2014 to 2025, drawn from the open Missing Migrants Project dataset as updated in late September 2026. Recent years are revised as late reports arrive, so the last bar can differ from the totals quoted in the text.

Chart by Fix Planet from Missing Migrants Project data of the International Organization for Migration, via the Humanitarian Data Exchange, licence Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 IGO (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/). Dataset page: https://data.humdata.org/dataset/missing-migrants-project-data

What it is

Asia covers many routes, among them the journeys of Afghans to and through Iran and the sea crossings of the Rohingya, a people fleeing conflict and persecution in Myanmar, across the Bay of Bengal. The Eastern Route runs both ways between the Horn of Africa and Yemen and the Gulf countries. In February 2026 the Missing Migrants Project of the International Organization for Migration reported more than 3,000 deaths recorded during migration in Asia in 2025, and 922 on the Eastern Route.

Why it matters

The organization describes 2025 as the deadliest year on record for migrants in Asia, for the third year in a row. Much of the rise comes from the deaths of Afghans leaving their country, with 1,540 reported dead. On the Eastern Route almost all those who died in 2025 were Ethiopian, many of them in three mass shipwrecks that each claimed more than 180 lives. The annual report of April 2026 adds that nearly 900 deaths were recorded in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea in 2025, the deadliest year on record there, including four large shipwrecks in which nearly 800 people, Rohingya refugees, are believed to have died.

How to read it

The two headline figures overlap in part, so adding them would count some people twice. Most Eastern Route deaths were recorded in and off Yemen, which the project's regional classification places in Western Asia, so they also belong to the Asia count. The comparison to make is with the year before: the Eastern Route rose from 558 deaths in 2024 to 922 in 2025. The annual report gives 3,314 for Asia in 2025, against 2,793 in 2024, which was already a record.

Limits

The annual report calls its data on Afghan migrants highly incomplete. Search and rescue is rarely carried out for migrant boats in distress in the Bay of Bengal, so smaller shipwrecks and boats that vanish entirely are likely to have gone undocumented. Humanitarian access to the northern border of Yemen was restricted from late 2023, which means that many deaths there are probably unrecorded. The February press release gives 1,540 Afghans reported dead without saying how the number was compiled; the April annual report separately gives at least 1,323 Afghans who died in transit in Iran, the highest since 2014.

Sources