Houthis run secret jails to torture dissenting women
This is the darkest age for Yemeni women
Al Huri a former woman detainee
I was so far away, like I’d fallen off the earth
Woman teacher, detained by Houthi rebels
cairo — Samera Al Huri’s fellow activists were disappearing, one by one. When she asked their families, each gave the same cryptic reply: ‘She’s travelling’. A few of the women re-emerged. But they seemed broken and refused to say where they had been for months. Al Huri soon found out.
A dozen officers from the Houthi rebels who control northern Yemen snatched her from her home in the capital Sanaa at dawn.
They took her to the basement of a converted school, its filthy cells filled with female detainees. Interrogators beat her bloody, gave her electrical shocks and, as psychological torture, scheduled her execution only to call it off last-minute.
Women who dare dissent, or even enter the public sphere, have become targets in an escalating crackdown by the Houthis.
Activists and former detainees described a network of secret detention facilities where they are tortured and sometimes raped.
“Many had it worse than me,” said Al Huri, 33, who survived three months in detention until she confessed on camera to fabricated prostitution charges.
Women have increasingly taken political roles in Yemen as men die in battle or languish in jail in a conflict now dragging into its sixth year. Women are organising protests, leading movements or working for international organisations — all acts the Houthis view as a threat. Once women were guarded from detention and abuse by conservative traditions and tribal protections, but those taboos are succumbing to the pressures of war.
“This is the darkest age for Yemeni women,” said Rasha Jarhum, founder of the Peace Track Initiative, which lobbies for women’s inclusion in peace talks between Houthis and the internationally recognised government.
Conservative estimates of women currently detained range from 200 to 350 in the Sanaa area alone, according to multiple rights groups.
Noura Al Jarwi, head of the Women for
Peace in Yemen Coalition, has documented 33 cases of rape and eight instances of women debilitated by torture.
Systematic arrests and prisons rife with torture have been central to war efforts by both sides, the Iranian-backed Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition trying to oust them, the AP has found.
But the intimidation campaign against women is unique to rebel-held areas, observers say.
The AP met with six former detainees who managed to flee to Cairo before the coronavirus pandemic grounded flights and closed borders. Their accounts are supported by a recent report from a UN panel of experts.
One woman, a former history teacher who asked not to be identified to protect
family in Yemen, was swept up in a crackdown on protests in December 2017.
She was taken to a villa on Sanaa’s outskirts, though she didn’t know where. At night, all she could hear was barking dogs, not even the call to prayer.
“I was so far away, like I’d fallen off the earth,” she said.
In more than one case, three masked officers told her to pray and said they would purify her from sin. They took turns raping her.
The Houthis’ human rights minister denied the torture allegations and the existence of clandestine women’s prisons.
“If this is found, we will tackle this problem,” Radia Abdullah, one of two female Houthi ministers, said in an interview. —