In Yemen’s second most populated city, a Houthi blockade has brought residents previously barely subsisting to the brink of catastrophe

Ismail lies on green linoleum sheets, his black eyes too large for his gaunt face. Craning his neck, he tries to inspect the bandage covering his body, but weakness pulls him back. From the pillow, he whispers “hawan” (mortar).

Ismail, who says he is 12 but has the body of a six-year-old, used to make a few Yemeni riyals every day by washing graves in a new cemetery in the city of Taiz devoted to those killed in Yemen’s ongoing civil war.

Just before noon on one day in November, he and his two young cousins were sitting under a mango tree, cleaning the grave of a 10-year-old girl called Basma, when three mortar shells fell. A splatter of deep scars on the tree trunk and on the grave’s concrete surface mark the spot where one exploded. The two cousins, aged two and four, died instantly.

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Ismail was severely injured and is now in the Rawdha, a hotel-turned-hospital in Taiz, Yemen’s second most populated city, a place being slowly strangled by a Houthi rebel siege. He is far from the only one here. One floor above, Amer recounts how he was hit by an explosion after dining in a restaurant and walking out into the street. The threads stitching folds of flesh on the stump of his left leg are black and new.

Above them both, on the top floor of the Rawdha, lies a young man with both lungs punctured by a sniper bullet. A white tube runs through a hole in his neck and connects him to a ventilator. A nurse in a blue robe and black burqa sits next to him, ready to start manually pumping air when the generator stops.

These are just three of the tens of thousands who have been injured in nine long months of war in Yemen: a conflict which has killed an estimated 5,700 people – half of them civilians and 1,500 of them children – since it started in March.

Then, in an internationalisation of a war which had been raging since Houthi rebels occupied parts of the capital, Sana’a, last year, Saudi Arabia formed a coalition of Arab countries and started a bombing campaign supported by the US and Britain.

The aim: to force the withdrawal of the Houthis – a militia supported by army units loyal to longtime former president Ali Abdullah Saleh and allied to Iran, Riyadh’s regional rival – and to restore the government of the internationally recognised president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The Houthis’ aim was to stand their ground, build on the gains so dramatically made in preceding months, and send Hadi and his government into exile.

In the nine months that have followed, both sides have committed numerous war crimes, according to human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

“All the participants of this war have committed a wide range of human rights violations,” says Abdulrasheed al-Faqeeh, executive director of Mowatana, a local organisation that has been documenting accounts of war crimes all over Yemen since the start of the war.

“The Saudi-led coalition have attacked civilian targets, schools, hospitals and infrastructure projects, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians, while the Yemeni combatants – the Houthis and the resistance – have also killed and injured hundreds of civilians in their attacks on residential neighbourhoods. They have also recruited children, kidnapped and forcefully disappeared hundreds, and laid siege to the population in different parts of the country.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A civilian stands stands a the entrance of his destroyed house in the Yemeni city of Taiz. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad/The Guardian

The failure of the two sides to achieve their goals has pushed them into accepting a fragile, oft-violated ceasefire and into a second round of negotiations brokered by the UN. Talks are due to resume in January. But in places such as Taiz, peace feels further away than ever.

Life under siege

The Saudi coalition is imposing a crippling blockade on Yemen, punishing the civilian population in its attempts to weaken the Houthis and their allies. In Sana’a, for example, petrol has become so precious it is sold in small plastic bottles, while electricity is now so scarce that Yemenis joke about the city winning an environmental award.

The Houthis, meanwhile, have laid their own siege: on Taiz. The Guardian was able to visit the city earlier in December despite a blockade that has brought a population previously barely subsisting to the brink of catastrophe.

Since early April, when “the resistance” – an alliance of local forces dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood – fought off the Houthis’ attempt to control the city, the militia retaliated by cutting off roads, preventing food and medical aid from getting in. Access is only allowed through a single checkpoint, dubbed the Rafah crossing by the residents after its more famous namesake on the Egypt-Gaza border.

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Every morning long queues form outside the crossing by those wanting to enter the city. Houthi militia search – and confiscate – medicine, cooking gas, cigarettes, bottled water or anything more than a small shopping bag of food.

In order to survive, this city has for months been relying on groups of young boys and long trains of donkeys to bring in supplies via a long and arduous journey through the mountains.

Just before sunrise, in a valley thick with clouds of mist, a group of young children with headlamps covering half their heads, start thrashing, pushing and dragging donkeys and camels up a narrow trail scaling one of the high peaks surrounding Taiz. The long caravan laden with petrol jerrycans, sacks of wheat, boxes of tomatoes and potatoes, marches single file, climbing over boulders and rocks, curving around cliffs that afford glimpses of distant villages and terraced fields.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Resistance fighters in the besieged city of Taiz. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul Ahad/The Guardian

But the donkeys alone can hardly fulfil the needs of the city. Medicine and food have all but disappeared from the market and the prices of what are left have jumped in the last few months, pushing most of the population below the poverty line.

“For eight months we have lived on porridge and bread and smuggled yogurt,” says Nabil, a jovial clerk employed by a pharmaceutical company, who did not want his full name published for security reasons. “I can’t afford to buy milk for my two-year-old boy and yet I am one of the lucky ones because I am still paid a salary.”

In one of the few open restaurants, a young boy sits politely waiting for a group of customers to leave before he rushes in to finish off whatever is left on their plates.

The siege is so tight that the Rawdha, one of the city’s two functioning hospitals, has run out of oxygen bottles. The other has only five left. “It’s a horrible situation,” says one of the doctors at the Rawdha. “We can’t do operations. We can’t put people in intensive care. We can only patch wounds and tell the patient: you are welcome to die here.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Smugglers take a break after delivering food to the besieged city Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad/The Guardian

At Taiz’s other hospital, al-Thawra, two doctors stand in front of the doors of the operation room debating which of the two injured men lying inside has a better chance of survival and should therefore be granted a lifesaving operation using the precious remaining oxygen.

Inside the operation room the face of one injured fighter twitches with pain as a doctor drills screws and fixes a metal bar into a leg shattered by a sniper bullet. With no oxygen, most of the operations are done only with local anaesthesia.

Behind the barricades

By night, Taiz – like most of Yemen these days – is wrapped in a blackness that the few flickering lights fail to disperse. The streets are dead but for howls of dogs, and the silence is only shattered when resistance and Houthi fighters start lobbing volleys of tank and mortar shells at each other. Heavy machine guns sound somewhere in the distance, in one of the numerous frontlines encircling the city.



In the morning, Taiz, a city that prides itself as the civil and intellectual heart of Yemen, comes to life under a white film of acrid smoke that rises from dozens of rubbish fires.

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Women and children sit patiently next to their plastic jerrycans arranged neatly in long queues in front of communal barrels, waiting for local activists to distribute water. With schools shut, boys and girls become water-mules, spending their mornings bent under the weight of the filled containers or pushing wheelbarrows piled high with them.

In the long months of siege and war, the barricades – mounds of dirt topped with metal sheets and lumps of concrete – have become permanent fixtures of the neighbourhoods. Rubbish is piled over them, wild shrubs sprout on top and gunmen lie in their shade. They stand blocking streets long after the frontlines have shifted elsewhere, a lingering reminder of a violence that moves but never really goes away.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nasser stands on his half-shattered balcony. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad/The Guardian

On a half-shattered balcony stands Nasser, a bespectacled, white-haired man. Walking down to the street, he proudly shows the remains of mortar shells that have hit his house. “The Houthis were up the hill behind the house,” he says, pointing at the wreckage of Saleh’s party headquarters. “And the resistance were around that street corner, and I was in the middle. I just refused to leave my house. Where would I go? Every day I had to ask their permission to go shopping; they would allow me to leave the house once and both accused me of working for the other.”

At night he used a small oil lamp to prepare meals, shielding the flame with a cardboard box, lest a sniper be tempted by the light. He falls on his knees in the street to show how he used to crawl to the bathroom when bullets flew up and down the street.

Nasser points at two shops under his balcony, their metal shutters riddled with bullets and distorted by fire. “I am a retired teacher and the rent of these shops helped us survive, now they are gone,” he says. “We have a saying in Yemen: ‘It’s forbidden to stab a corpse of the dead.’ We were already dead with poverty and this war is stabbing us again and again.”