Evil that lurks within a war-torn country
The parents of Huda, 13, ensured she wanted for nothing – until their pay stopped. That opened the door to a predator who tore their lives apart, reports Mohammed Al Qalisi, Foreign Correspondent
ADEN // Huda Tareq was used to being spoilt by her parents, both educated professionals, and her five older brothers.
Growing up in Taez Hadad, a town about 60 kilometres from Taez city, the schoolgirl, 13, always had more pocket money than her classmates to buy snacks, soft drinks and sweets.
But all that changed in September last year when her parents, who are public-sector employees, stopped receiving their salaries.
Huda eventually fell victim to a sexual predator who exploited her family’s economic hardship, brought on by the continuing war waged by Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Taez province became one of the main battlegrounds in the civil war that broke out after rebels seized the country’s capital, Sanaa, in September 2014.
Two years later president Abdrabu Mansur Hadi moved the central bank from Sanaa to Aden – the temporary seat of his government.
Only state employees in gov- ernment-held areas have been able to receive their pay since.
Huda’s father Omar, a school teacher, and her mother Efrah, a nurse at a nearby government hospital, could barely afford the family’s basic necessities, let alone the small luxuries to which Huda was accustomed.
“Huda hated going to school because she thought she did not have suitable shoes and pocket money and sometimes she did not have any notebooks,” Efrah says.
About two months after the wages stopped, Huda came home from school one day wearing new shoes and clothes, and with pocket money. Asked where she got these things, Huda told her parents that her aunt had been generous.
“One of my sisters is rich and she used to provide us with some needs, so I believed Huda that my sister helped her,” Efrah says.
“I did not think that my pampered daughter was lying.”
One month after Huda started coming back with new things, she told her mother that she wanted to spend the night at her aunt’s house, as she sometimes did, and Efrah agreed. But Huda did not come home the next day and her parents found out that she had not gone to school either.
“I asked my sister about her,” Efrah says. “She said that she had not seen Huda for a month. “I was shocked and we immediately notified Al Shimayateen district police station.”
The police questioned Huda’s teachers, classmates and anyone else who knew her, but they could not find her.
After two days of searching, neighbours found Huda’s body and her school bag floating in the village dam.
“The signs of rape were clear on Huda’s body and this is what the forensic examination confirmed,” Efrah says.
“Then we realised that a man who had been giving Huda presents had raped her then killed her to protect himself.”
Jamal Al Shami, president of the Democracy School, a charity in Sanaa that does advocacy work for children, says the economic hardship caused by the war has created an environment in which children are much more vulnerable to sexual predators.
“The economic crisis has had a negative effect on children on several issues, including harassment and sexual exploitation, but there are no figures regarding this yet,” Mr Al Shami says.
Police detained and questioned several young men suspected of raping and murdering Huda, but so far they have not been able to find any evidence and no one has been charged.
Huda’s family buried her in December.
The family holds little hope of the authorities being able to provide closure and justice, at least in this world.
“The criminal could escape now,” Efrah says. “But he cannot escape the afterlife and Allah will punish him.”
Children much more vulnerable to predators