There have been Yemenis in Cardiff since 1860. For this community, the UK’s role in the conflict is personal

On a gusty bright day in Butetown, Cardiff, members of the Yemeni community are preparing for Friday prayers. The red-brick buildings of Alice Street mosque were thrown up in the 1970s but there has been a mosque here since 1860, making Butetown one of Britain’s longest-established Muslim communities.

When coal from south Wales powered the world’s engine rooms, thousands of Yemeni sailors and dockhands found work in Cardiff. Today, around 500 people, mostly of Yemeni descent, come to Alice Street to pray on Fridays. They speak with pride of how their community is part of the fabric of Welsh history, and many are looking on with sadness and frustration as Yemen’s war unfolds far away.

“I am a Welshman through and through. I’ve lived all over the world, but Cardiff is the only home I want,” said Ameen al-Dobhani, a member of the Alice Street Yemeni community centre. “That doesn’t mean we forget our roots and our relatives who are suffering. We feel powerless that it is our British government who is letting this happen.”

Almost everyone in this community has relatives stuck in Yemen, where almost four years of civil war has killed about 60,000 and left half of the 28 million population on the brink of starvation.

Much of the blame for the humanitarian disaster is laid at the door of the Saudi Arabian-led coalition, which is aided by British arms sales and military consultants. Saudi bomber pilots are trained at RAF Valley in Anglesey, north Wales.

“Imagine: they come to Wales, to our home, to learn how to kill us,” said Daoud Ali Salaman, chair of the Islamic Centre, who keeps his cossack-style hat on inside his office against the December chill.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Daoud Ali Salaman, right, and Neil McEvoy.

A fragile ceasefire in the vital Yemeni port of Hodeidah took hold last week, but there is not much hope here that it will last. There is anger, too, at the government’s perceived unwillingness to help people with dual British-Yemeni nationality escape the war: the Foreign Office says it cannot provide consular assistance as it evacuated diplomatic staff in 2015.

Birmingham-based Abdul Kadir Ayed helps those he can to procure travel papers and extortionately expensive flight tickets, but thinks some 2,000 British people in Yemen are trapped by the fighting and a collapsed economy, with no idea where to turn for help.

In the Ely district of western Cardiff, Jackie Saleh is busy hiding Christmas presents before her grandchildren come to visit after school. The whole family, she says, is hoping for a Christmas miracle.

Her adult daughter Safia, who along with her two sisters was abducted by her father and taken to Yemen as a baby, has been helped by friends to get a new British passport.

Thanks to a crowdfunding campaign, Safia and her four children should be flying to Egypt on 24 December, and then on to the UK. Saleh’s two Welsh grandchildren and four Yemeni grandchildren have been teaching each other words in English and Arabic during video calls and are excited about meeting for the first time. “My whole life I’ve wanted to bring my daughters home to Wales,” Saleh said over tea in her living room, “and we are so close now. I won’t have to worry whether Safia’s family are alive or dead.”

Neil McEvoy, an independent Welsh Assembly member whose grandfather came from the Yemeni city Ebb to work on Cardiff’s docks in the 1930s, has pressed new first minister Mark Drakeford to raise the Salehs’ case with the Foreign Office once the family arrive in Cairo.

“Yemenis helped build this country, and without Yemeni sailors getting food to Britain in the second world war, we would have starved,” he said. “They paid for it with their lives sometimes – torpedoed by the Germans. And now we are helping Saudi Arabia starve Yemen.”

The Salehs are praying everything will go smoothly for Safia. When Saleh’s ex-husband Sadek left in 1986, he also took almost every photograph of their three girls. One, of a teenage Jackie dressed in pink, holding Safia’s elder sister Rahannah, sits on the mantelpiece, its glass reflecting the Christmas tree lights.

“First it was my ex-husband and then it was the war that stopped us taking new photos together,” she said. “I can’t wait to fill this house with family pictures.”