Mauritania: 144 migrants dead or missing at sea in one week off Nouadhibou

Herz — World Desk · 21 July 2026 at 12:00 · 30s summary · 2 min read

What we know

Between July 14–18, 2026, 144 people died or went missing at sea off Mauritania's coast. This toll comes from UNHCR — United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, a UN agency founded in 1950 to protect refugees and asylum seekers — as reported by Le Monde.

During the same week, three rescue and disembarkation operations brought 387 people safely to Nouadhibou — Mauritania's second-largest city, located on the northwestern Atlantic coast of the country.

Context: One of the world's deadliest routes

The West Africa–Canary Islands Atlantic route runs along Mauritania's coast. The International Organization for Migration's (IOM) Missing Migrants Project classifies it among the world's deadliest migration routes, due to the long distances traveled in open ocean, often aboard overloaded makeshift vessels.

The migration crisis in the Canary Islands intensified starting in 2020, with 23,023 arrivals recorded that year, compared to only 2,698 in 2019. By mid-October 2020, more than 1,000 migrants reached the Spanish archipelago in just 48 hours aboard 37 vessels, according to data from Wikipedia on the Canary Islands migration crisis.