When Aya’s[1] husband was killed early in Yemen’s protracted conflict, she fled with her seven children to the village. There, some kind villagers offered them a small space to live in rent-free. However, they still had no way to afford food. In the city, Aya’s husband had always earned enough as a daily wage laborer to keep the family’s stomachs full. Now a widow in the village, Aya began to depend on whatever her neighbors could spare—neighbors who were struggling to make ends meet themselves. Aya’s older children also began going out to sell treats in neighboring villages. This brought some income—but it was never enough to provide an entire meal for all eight members of the family. When a local nonprofit began providing them with a food basket every other month a few years ago, it was the first time since Aya’s husband died that everyone in the household began eating three meals a day again. The food baskets also meant that Aya’s children could stop selling treats and enroll in school. Ensuring that women and children like Aya’s household have sustained access to food and education is critical to Yemen’s future. Unfortunately, after more than eight years of war, Yemen’s most vulnerable families are expecting things to get worse in the final months of 2023.[2]
Yemen’s humanitarian funding gap has risen steadily over the last five years and as of August 2023, the United Nations’ Humanitarian Response Plan for what it continues to call one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises was barely 30 percent funded. This is resulting in drastic and concerning cuts to aid, including the suspension of malnutrition prevention interventions in Yemen beginning at the end of this month. Meanwhile, many of the 4.5 million[3] Yemenis who have been displaced over the course of the nation’s war continue to face harsh conditions.[4] Extreme weather has added to Yemen’s complex crisis, displacing more than 200,000 people so far in 2023—many of whom had already been displaced by conflict.[5] While Yemeni civil society organizations like the one that delivers food assistance to Aya’s family remain dedicated to Yemen’s long-term development, significant reductions in international assistance since 2020 are impacting their ability to retain staff and continue operating. Without increases in quality funding towards strengthening the autonomy and sustainability of these local non-profits, international partners may not be able to fulfill their commitments to locally driven programming—including initiatives aimed at breaking the vicious cycles of poverty and conflict that Yemen’s next generation seems increasingly doomed to repeat.
In 2016, Farea Al-Muslimi, co-founder of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, explained that the roots of Yemen’s war economy—particularly in the nation’s north—stretch back over a millennium. Beginning with the emergence of the Zaydi state in northern Yemen in the 9th Century, Al-Muslimi describes a deliberate policy of “impoverishing the people, without offering them any prospects for education or a decent life.” As fighting became the only means to make money, northern tribes were duly curated into reservoirs of fighters who needed conflict to sustain their livelihoods and identity. This enabled rulers with access to the state’s coffers and the tribal sheikhs on their payroll to control the people’s fate, ensuring a ready supply of human fodder to fuel their wars. Meanwhile, those with a vision for a peaceful Yemen—including Yemen’s Queen Arwa who ruled for five decades beginning in the 11th Century—sought to shift the nation’s center of power away from the war economy of the north. After the Queen saw the contrast between the armed warlords who greeted her in Sana’a and the simple farmers who hailed her in the city of Jibla, located in what is today Yemen’s central province of Ibb—she convinced her husband to move the capital from Sana’a to Jibla saying, “Here, Jibla the bread, and there, Sana’a the army.”[6]
Queen Arwa’s reign, however, would only be a brief interlude within centuries of Zaydi dominance in northern Yemen, which lasted until 1962 when the Zaydi Mutawakkilite Kingdom was overthrown by revolutionary republicans. In an analysis published this month, Yemeni journalist and researcher Afrah Nasser explains how Yemen’s subsequent wars, including the 1994 Yemeni Civil War, the 2004 Houthi insurgency, Yemen’s 2011 Arab Spring uprising, and the current war were all driven by punitive policies that impoverished Yemeni groups and perpetuated the war economy that benefits the nation’s elites. “The systematic extraction and depletion of people’s wealth, or rather the transfer of wealth from the citizenry to the political and military elite is one of the key manifestations of the war economy, and has led to a widening gap between the rich and the poor,” she wrote.[7]
Thus, once again, Yemen’s rulers have been able to take advantage of the population’s deepening poverty and poor educational prospects to shape identities and the historic and contemporary narratives that drive both the war and their profits from it. This time, children are particularly vulnerable and Yemenis noticed the Houthis’ unprecedented use of child soldiers from the first year of the current conflict. “In 2015, when I escaped from Yemen to Saudi Arabia—I took a bus,” says Mona, a Yemeni mother of two sons who now lives in Europe. “I was on that bus for 25 hours—and children ran all the checkpoints that we were stopped at along the way. They were 10, 11, or 12—I began to see them when we reached Hodeidah and it continued until we got near the Saudi border. Imagine. Even those at the Houthi checkpoints around Taiz were all children—10, 11, or 12.”
It has been eight years since Mona made that trip, and many Yemeni mothers from Hodeidah now living as refugees in Cairo cite fears of the Houthis conscripting their sons to fight in their militias as a driving factor in their decision to flee their homeland. Meanwhile, Yemen’s sons who remain in the country often have the least means and little to no education—making them fertile ground for the ideology of any party offering humanitarian aid in this life and the glories reserved for martyrs in the life to come. Thus, children fighting for the warring parties today are likely to continue in the service of their warlords who profit in times of bloodshed when the current conflict ends. Without a better narrative and better opportunities, they will both soon be in need of a new conflict to sustain their identities and livelihoods. As Nasser wrote in a February 2023 report on Yemen’s child soldiers, “The recruitment of children for warfare in Yemen is not only a fundamental human rights issue; it is also a profound peace issue. No society can achieve peace by turning its children into soldiers.”[8]
Today, almost one-fifth of Yemeni children have lost their homes, about two million children are out of schools, 12 million need immediate humanitarian assistance, 400,000 are expected to suffer from severe malnutrition, and more than 10,200 have been killed or maimed in the armed conflict,[9] with some accounts suggesting that Houthi snipers have even systematically targeted children in frontline areas.[10] In a joint statement released on September 14th, international and national actors within Yemen’s humanitarian and development community called for ensuring funding for initiatives that have a determining role in Yemen’s longer-term recovery—such as education and economic development—without undermining humanitarian funding to address immediate needs.[11] If this call is not heeded, Aya’s seven children, and millions of children like them across Yemen, may once again drop out of school and go to work in an effort to stave off hunger and malnutrition. Many will also go to war—either in this conflict or the next.
[1] Names changed to protect a vulnerable Yemeni family living through conflict.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tm2gBEZvSc
[3] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/displaced-yemeni-families-torn-apart-by-ongoing-conflict/2986669
[4] https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/middle-east-matters/20230906-nine-years-of-war-in-yemen-is-there-any-hope-of-a-ceasefire
[5] https://www.barrons.com/news/flooding-lightning-strikes-kill-8-in-war-hit-yemen-aa446f0f
[6] https://sanaacenter.org/publications/analysis/33
[7] https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/yemens-war-economy-a-key-factor-in-the-ongoing-conflict/
[8] https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/child-soldiers-in-yemen-cannon-fodder-for-an-unnecessary-war/
[9] https://www.dailypioneer.com/2023/sunday-edition/yemen–a-live-hell-for-children.html
[10] https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-56072279
[11] https://reliefweb.int/report/yemen/joint-statement-yemen-humanitarian-situation-and-funding-gap-enar
Comments +