Yemen refugee camps bombed by Houthi rebels

Tens of thousands of people have starved to death, and in Yemen’s seven-year war millions are now displaced, some bombed even out of their refugee camps.

For one boy, his tent on a remote desert plain in central Yemen was no place of refuge. Mohammed Hamid, 15, does not remember much about the Katyusha rocket the advancing Houthi rebels fired at his refugee camp, south of the city of al-Jawf, but he will forever bear the results: a missing hand and a sightless left eye.

His mother, who had just left the tent, saw what happened. “The children were all playing, it was entirely normal,” she said. “But then the missiles arrived. It was obvious they were targeting the camp.”

The war in Yemen has been portrayed in some quarters as an assault on the country’s civilians by the Saudi air force. But as it approaches an endgame around the central city of Marib, the main front line now in the conflict between the Saudi-backed government and the Iranian-backed Houthis, it is the rebels who are pouring missiles into civilian areas.

Some have hit Marib itself, the capital city of a province that was once home to perhaps 400,000 people but whose population has been swollen by more than two million displaced from elsewhere in the country.

“I was in the office behind my supermarket,” said Othman Mujahid, 26, as he recalled the missile strike that scarred much of his body, leaving him needing several operations to save his sight and shattering one of his knees. “The bomb was completely random.”

Mujahid, who is married with three children, is from Sanaa but moved to Marib in 2015 to avoid being forcibly recruited by the Houthis who had seized the capital the previous September.

The Houthis, a northern tribal group which capitalised on national divisions arising from the ousting in 2011 of President Saleh, are now imposing a harsh rule across much of the northwest. Dissent is punished, and although the Houthis’ religion, a form of Shia Islam known as Zaidism, is different from that practised in Iran, its strictures have been applied more and more aggressively as the Iranian influence has increased.

Mothers of the Abductees, a campaign group that works with political prisoners seized by the various factions fighting in Yemen’s war, say that the greatest number, more than 1,000, have been detained by the Houthis.

That and the fear of forcible recruitment have caused hundreds of thousands of people to flee.

Most have come to Marib, which was seen as relatively safe. Other parts of the country under notional government control, including Aden, the second city, are either riven by factional fighting within the pro-government forces or are at risk from al-Qaeda and other militant groups.

Other areas are suffering from the famine, caused by the war, which has put millions of people at risk of starvation.

Aid agencies say that the Houthis have deliberately targeted refugee camps and civilian areas to spread terror as they advance on Marib.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that it noticed the trend from February this year when the rebels started mass attacks on government lines, apparently emboldened by President Biden’s decision to reduce US support for Saudi Arabia’s role in the war. In that month alone, Houthi missiles hit four refugee camps northwest of Marib, including the one where young Mohammed and his family were living.

“The Houthis’ indiscriminate artillery and rocket attacks toward populated areas in Marib have put displaced persons and local communities at severe risk,” said Afrah Nasser, HRW’s Yemen researcher.

Mohammed’s family were originally from Amran, the province immediately to the north of Sanaa, and they had fled the Houthi advance across northern Yemen. After he was treated for his injuries, first in al-Jawf city and then in a rehabilitation facility in Marib, his family moved to a new camp farther from the front lines.

Others have been forced to move repeatedly; Abdulwasser Saleh, 31, a volunteer at Mohammed’s camp, said he had changed camp three times. The latest, a sprawling group of tents on an entirely barren hillside outside Marib, now houses more than 12,000 people. It suffers 40C heat in the summer and flash floods in the winter. Its managers say it has only enough fresh water for 60 per cent of its needs, and is short of sanitation facilities.

But for the moment it is safe.

“The missiles came raining in and then the Houthis arrived,” Saleh said of the attack that forced him from his previous place of refuge, in Majzar district, which the rebels captured last year.

The Houthi attacks on Marib are being kept at bay by Saudi airstrikes. The western military assessment is that, despite the rebel advances this year, the city can hold out, and that the war will drift to a stalemate, forcing new peace negotiations.

However, the longer-term effect of the removal of US support for the Saudi air force is yet to be felt. In terms of heavy weaponry, the Houthis, who are supplied and trained in the use of missiles and drones by Iran, have the upper hand. They have shown no compunction in using those weapons on the civilian populations of both the city and of the surrounding camps.

“If they come here, we will just have to go farther into the desert,” said Yahya Mohammed, 25, another man sporting scars across his chest and stomach from a missile hit. “We will keep on going.”