Uniquba Yemen Taiz Ahmed al-Basha/IRIN 30-year-old Samira Ahmed says she can only buy half the food she could before the war.

With no income, families in Uniquba are now entirely reliant on remittances from Yemen’s urban centres. “We can only buy half the food we could before [the war],” said 30-year-old Samira Ahmed, sitting next to the spring in a traditional wide-brimmed straw hat, her face tinged orange by turmeric – a traditional form of sun protection.

Healthcare is also an unaffordable luxury for the rural population. No one can pay the 5,000 YR (around $15) charge for the taxi ride to the asphalt road a few miles down the mountain track, putting access to medical care out of reach for thousands of families living beyond the scope of aid agencies in remote highland villages.

To add to the daily burden, the population of Uniquba has grown as a result of the conflict. Fathers and sons previously working in cities returned to their village homes as the violence escalated, businesses closed and many lost their jobs. The village has also become a local safe-haven for those displaced from areas closer to the front line.

Hazaa Hassan Zayid has 10 children and no job after his work as a builder petered out. “Now I rely on my brother,” he said. “He has three of his own children, but I need him so we can eat and also to pay the rent for the land, so we can farm.”

Many of Uniquba’s villagers returned from Taiz city, where, although a year-long siege has eased, a continuing partial Houthi-imposed blockade means a less than 15 minute journey across the east of the city now takes five hours. Supply trucks trying to reach civilians on the southern side of Taiz are forced to navigate a long stretch of dry riverbed – a route that will be cut off when the rains come in April.

Inside the enclave, even districts “liberated” from Houthi rebels remain ghostly quiet; notices daubed on doors of houses and walls warn of booby-traps and mines. Too afraid to return, residents have abandoned their homes indefinitely, haunted by stories of returnees blown up when they opened their front door, their corpses found days later.

Closer to the front lines, tarpaulins stretch across narrow streets – to block the view of Houthi gunmen – accompanied by signs alerting any brave passers-by to the presence of snipers, waiting to pick off their next victim. Children collecting water, men carrying groceries – none are safe from the hidden predators lingering in buildings a few metres away.

Taiz Yemen Iona Craig/IRIN A man fixes a solar panel in front of a blue tarpaulin, used to block the view of Houthi snipers, strapped between bullet-ridden buildings in Taiz.

The Médecins Sans Frontières-supported Yemeni Swedish Hospital was once Taiz's primary care facility for children. But the paediatric hospital was decimated after the Houthi-Saleh forces took up residence inside the building early in the conflict. With famine looming, Taiz has lost a vital paediatric intensive care unit and nutrition centre because two floors have been abandoned due to extensive damage. The hospital’s feeding centre for malnourished children is now operating out of six beds squeezed into one small room on the ground floor.

One of the patients was five-month-old Raoud from al-Sabir. Her skin hanging from her scrawny hands, she was born malnourished and brought in by her visibly thin mother Raghda weighing just three kilos, less than half the expected weight of a healthy baby her age.

“The desperate situation in Taiz exemplifies what is happening in Yemen as a whole,” MSF’s emergency manager for Yemen, Karline Kleijer, said in a statement late last month. It’s often young children like Raoud who suffer first.

According to UN figures, 460,000 Yemeni children currently have severe acute malnutrition. Funding shortages have forced the WFP to cut provisions in Yemen by more than half since last year. While the conflict has left a conservative estimate of some 10,000 dead, the toll on civilians from the ripple effect of the war is unquestionably higher.

With escalating violence on the western coast of the governorate forcing tens of thousands from their homes since January, unless there is a dramatic change in the trajectory of Yemen’s conflict in the coming months, Taiz governorate – including the villagers of Uniquba – is more than likely to be one of the first to gain the undesirable label of “famine.”

This article was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

(TOP PHOTO: A child is measured for the signs of malnourishment in Taiz. Ahmed al-Basha/IRIN)

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Yemen's silent disaster: A snapshot of life and death in rural Taiz