With no real peace in sight and land made unsafe by mines, Yemen's horrors haunt an exhausted people

Six years of Yemen's civil war have tested Tariq Hawat's belief that the pen can be mightier than the sword.

A schoolteacher, he hoped to devote his life to the classroom – a worthy calling in a land where only half the population are literate.

That, though, was before a fateful day in April 2015, when a car carrying four of his brothers, plus one of their wives with her baby boy and six-year-old daughter, was stopped by armed men near their village in southern Yemen's Shabwa province.

The gunmen – part of the Iran-backed Houthi militias that had stormed down from the north – fired directly into the car without a word.

One of his brothers was killed, as were his wife and baby, who bled to death as their daughter watched.

The bloodshed did not end there. As custom in southern Yemen dictates, the Hawat family’s wider tribe responded with ambushes against the Houthi brigades, until the Houthis bombed the family home and forced Tariq to flee with his wife and five-month old baby.

At that point, he signed up to fight the Houthis on the frontine.

"I couldn’t sit still," he said. "I wanted to do anything I could to get revenge for what happened.”

Today the Houthis have been pushed back from Shabwa and Tariq and his family are back home, although the scars of the war are far from healing.

He must now help look after his dead brother's family, as well as the two brothers who somehow survived the attack:

Yasser, who was crippled by a bullet in the knee, and Ahmed, who was blinded.  

“We’re living in such a sad situation, and we’re terrified that the Houthis will come back,” he said.

Tariq is among millions of Yemenis whose lives have been torn apart by the war, which has killed 120,000 and split the country into not two but three parts.

In the north and west are Houthis, who over-ran the capital Sana’a, in 2014.

In the south and east are forces loyal to President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who is backed by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, but who lives in exile in Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia.

And to the south-west are the separatists of the Southern Transitional Council, who ousted Mr Hadi's forces from Aden last year.

The Houthis have not been a threat in Shabwa for three years, after coalition-backed local forces pushed them out.

Yet, Shabwa's residents still face a daily threat from vast numbers of Houthi-planted landmines that have killed 600 people and disabled more than 400.

Some lie planted in Shabwa's farmlands, rendering much of it off-limits. Others lie buried in the crumbling road network, making much-needed road repairs a perilous task.

During The Telegraph's week-long trip to southern Yemen, everyone from politicians to hotel staff spoke of exhaustion from years of war.

The front lines have calcified to some extent, and the violence is currently at an ebb. However, a peace settlement seems as distant as ever – and for the 80 per cent of Yemen's population that live under Houthi control, conditions are going from bad to worse.

The Houthis – a once-marginalised group from Yemen's rugged north – seized control of Sana'a on the pretext that the central government was corrupt and incompetent. But their own rule has proved little better, charging citizens exorbitant taxes while offering almost no government services.

“Public employees aren’t receiving their salaries, there are no job opportunities, and people are struggling to buy food and medicine," said Maysaa Shuja al-Deen, of Yemeni think-tank The Sana’a Centre, whose family lives in Sana’a.

The Houthis also run their fiefdom as a police state, with human rights groups reporting hundreds of cases of arrest and torture in secret jails.

Among those in their custody is Tawfiq al Mansoury, 34, arrested by the Houthis in Sana'a in 2015 for “publishing fake news and working for foreign enemies.”

When coronavirus hit Yemen’s prisons this year, the family thought he would be released on humanitarian grounds. Instead, a Houthi court sentenced him to be executed.

“They’re holding him hostage,” said his brother Abdullah, who has fled with the rest the family to southern Yemen. “This is a political game, they use execution sentences for political negotiation.”

Yet, while the Houthis are unpopular, the one thing many Yemenis would dislike even more is return of Mr Hadi's government, most of whom have sat out the war in comfortable exile in Saudi Arabia.

“They see the government as outside Yemen, receiving their salaries in dollars and living lavishly in Riyadh,” says Ms al-Deen.

“At least the Houthis are seen to be living with the people."

The newest foreign entrant into the conflict’s complex web will be US President-elect Joe Biden’s administration. His first move will probably be to focus on the humanitarian crisis, says Jasmine el-Gamal, a former state department Middle East adviser who worked with Biden’s incoming team during the Obama years.

One way to do that would be to lean on Saudi Arabia to reduce its role in the conflict. Coalition air strikes in support of the Yemeni government forces have left thousands of civilians dead, injured and homeless.

How to handle the Houthis, however, is less obvious, and will be directed partly by how Mr Biden chooses to handle the US relationship with Iran.

“Iran will no longer be the bogey-man that it was under the Trump administration,” says Ms el-Gamal.

“That's not to say that the US will be soft on Iran when it comes to Yemen or support for the Houthis, but they won't be as willing as Trump was to look the other way when the Saudis do something just because Iran is involved.”

Since last week, the Trump administration has been considering designating the Houthis a terrorist organisation, a move that would sanction anyone funding or doing business with them.

Many diplomats, though, point out that few Houthis leaders have foreign business dealings anyway. Instead, they fear the main effect will be on civilian entrepreneurs and on Western aid organisations, who may reduce their involvement in Houthi-run areas.

The Houthis also have little incentive to enter peace negotiations. When the Saudis first began their war against them in 2015, it was assumed that Riyadh's well-financed military would soon prevail.

However, with the Saudis reluctant to commit a large-scale ground force, the Houthis have proved hard to dislodge.

Arms from their Iranian backers, meanwhile, have made them all the stronger.

"They are controlling the north and are happy with that, and see the other side getting weaker and weaker," Ms al-Deen added.

"The Saudis know they are losing the war but they can’t admit it, it’s difficult to end this war with a face-saving exit.”

Meanwhile, for people such as Tariq, the prospect of further years of stalled negotiations and economic sanctions is almost too much to bear.

“If this hadn’t happened, I would have completed my studies, and I could have made a decent income," he says, brows furrowed.

"But now we’re struggling to make a basic living. And we still have to think about fighting the Houthis. All those dreams I had are gone.”