Rebels target women who dare dissent

CAIRO — Samera alHuri’s fellow activists were disappearing, one by one. When she asked their families, each gave the same cryptic reply: “She’s traveling.” A few of the women reemerged. But they seemed broken and refused to say where they had been for months.

AlHuri 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 at the 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 alHuri, 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 organizing protests, leading movements or working for international organizations — all acts the Houthis view as a threat.

“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 recognized government.

Conservative estimates of women currently detained range from 200 to 350 in the Sanaa area alone, according to multiple rights groups.

Noura alJarwi, 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 Iranianbacked Houthis and the Saudiled coalition trying to oust them, the Associated Press has found.

But the intimidation campaign against women is unique to rebelheld areas, observers say.

Maya Alleruzzo / Associated Press Bardis Assayaghi, a prominent poet who circulated verses about Houthi repression, was detained in a school and counted some 120 women held there.