Content warning – the following article contains graphic descriptions of war
The horrors of this conflict, and the lives it has taken, must not be kept hidden. As the bombs continue to fall around us, I have gathered these witness testimonies as a memory against forgetting
I reached Aden, the temporary capital of Yemen, in the second week of March 2015. Missiles shook the city from all sides. Houthi militias bombed the presidential palace, where President Hadi was holed up. Army tanks trundled down the main streets. On 23 March, the decision to go to war was made; diplomats and international employees left Sana’a, Yemen’s largest city, while foreign embassies closed their doors and evacuated their personnel. Leaders of political parties departed the country with their families. I said farewell to some of them in good faith. I didn’t think that – having sensed the war was coming – they had decided to flee and leave us to our fate.
Hadi fled the country on 25 March. That same day, a military coalition organised by Saudi Arabia in support of Hadi and against the Houthi uprising began airstrikes. (The coalition also included the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt, Senegal, Sudan, Qatar and Morocco.) At 2am on Thursday 26 March, Arab coalition fighter planes suddenly cut through the Sana’a sky and war became a reality. What’s engraved in my mind from that morning isn’t the roar of the explosions, or the horrifying thunder of planes piercing the sound barrier, or my anxiety over the trajectory of missiles hitting targets further than I could see, or the sounds of war that I had grown accustomed to. Rather, it is the shock of how war was conjured, how life collapsed in one fell swoop – civil infighting, the humiliation of hunger, the indignity of it all, our generation’s lost dreams.
We have returned to precivilisation. All cities are without electricity: we live by candlelight and the gas lanterns our ancestors used. When the gas runs out at home, families resort to cutting down trees to burn in wood stoves. There’s no clean water to drink. Every day, children and elderly people line up with pots at tankers donated by some doer of good. You see poverty wherever you turn: citizens have lost their jobs and livelihoods, impoverished to the point where they don’t even question the meaning of war. Women and children fight over scraps from rubbish piles. Families sleep outside. People are relocated to miserable camps on the outskirts of cities and left there, abandoned by the world, forgotten.
Amid this complete misery, a different world emerged: one of new villas whose cement boundary walls span several streets, lavish highrises glittering in dusty backstreets, sprawling malls, new petrol stations, currency exchanges, private schools and hospitals – all financed by stolen national revenue. This is the world of the new war-rich, the war profiteers, the hidden market tycoons, the relatives of the Houthi militias and of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. Elites enrich themselves at the expense of the millions starving in Yemen. This is precisely why they are so keen for this war to last as long as possible.
As I write, the roar of explosions swells, our windows shudder. These explosions that rob people of their sleep, and sometimes of their lives, have become the backdrop to my writing about victims of war. It is as if time has stood still since I began writing and recording the testimonies of victims’ families.
The scars of war don’t go away. They stay in our souls and our memory. They remain alive in the memory of all those who have experienced war and suffered its destruction, those who have lost their loved ones. You cannot forget the horror of this war or our tragedy simply because the world wants to pull the curtain down over it, to hide the victims and reward the executioners. So, then, these witness testimonies, their voices, are a finger in the eyes of the murderers and the hunting dogs they hide behind. They are a memory against forgetting, against feigning ignorance, against indifference. They are comfort and peace for the souls of all of those who have been killed and the loved ones who are left behind with nothing but memories.
As told by Sumaiyya Ahmed Saeed, from the city of Taiz in Yemen’s south-west. On 20 August 2015, at 4.30pm, the Houthi militia targeted a group of children playing next to a shop that belonged to Sumaiyya’s husband, Muhammad Qasim Rashid al-Khadami, in Taiz’s al-Dhaboua neighbourhood. Three of their children – Usaid Muhammad Qasim Rashid al-Khadami (8), Rahma Muhammad Qasim Rashid al-Khadami (6), and Ezzedine Muhammad Qasim Rashid al-Khadami (2) – were killed, as was Sumaiyya’s father-in-law, Ahmed Ali Ahmed al-Khadami (50), and a number of other children from the neighbourhood.
A week ago, I was blessed with a boy; I named him Usaid [she bites her nails anxiously], after my firstborn, who was killed. I wish I didn’t remember what happened. In the early days, we would remember our children and cry – then, after some time we would each grieve alone. When Muhammad’s mind wanders and his vision glazes over, black, I know very well in those moments that he’s missing them. He doesn’t talk about the children, and when I ask him about them, he goes quiet. I cry, and he becomes sad and withdrawn.
As time went on, I convinced myself that it was better not to mention the children in front of him. I leave my sadness inside, lock it up in my heart. A pain has grown between us, one that has come to occupy a giant space in our lives. Even so, I didn’t want to make life harder for him – he was struggling to forget. What happened is still there in his injured eye, his glass eye, which contains it all. [I told her that when I interviewed her husband, he collapsed crying, so I stopped recording.] Whenever someone would visit me, I’d wail uncontrollably, not knowing who I was any more.
The thing is, I don’t have the kind of mind that can forget. I stay silent; Muhammad grows sadder. When we hear the bombs, I say: “The shells will kill us this time.” But when they pass over us, I think of the house the shells destroyed. I think of corpses, dead children, grieving mothers. That’s when I wish we lived in a room underground, so I wouldn’t hear the bombs or the news of death. I lost my baby in the first months of the war, when I was still in my first month of pregnancy. My children were killed after. [She cries.]
But what makes my story special? It’s the same for thousands of women who have lost their children to war. In every house in this city, there’s a story that must be put to bed, one that no one should reawaken. [She looks off into the distance.] I’m tired. I’ve been in this room overlooking the alleys the whole time, and from this low window I’ve heard the children’s squeals and shouting, my children’s friends playing, carrying on as if nothing has changed. Life goes on around me, indifferent to me – me, whose children were taken by war, with nothing left but my memories of them. I remember my son Usaid and my daughter Rahma playing in the neighbourhood while I tidied up the house and prepared lunch. They raised their voices to let me know they were nearby. Such things would comfort me. But what’s the use of remembering now?
When I think of them being killed, I lose it. [She cries.] I remember my last words with my uncle – I was standing in the basement room we used to live in, my children playing around me like always; I was reassured by their racket. My uncle picked up my son Ezzedine and said: “I’ll take him outside with me to get some fresh air.” I didn’t think that would be the last time I’d ever see them. [She cries.] I felt a tightness in my chest – I couldn’t breathe, and asked myself: “Why is the basement so hot today? Why is it so dark, even though the lights are on?”
As Muhammad was getting ready to go out, he said: “The resistance has freed the al-Qahira Castle! The world is safe again, let the children play outside.” Hearing what her father said, Rahma took her twin sister and went out, with the others following behind. I don’t know why I let them go out. [She weeps bitterly.] The basement walls crumbled under the force of the blast – the world around me grew dark. I called out to Muhammad to bring the children inside, but he didn’t answer. Then I heard a scream, like the sound of an animal being slaughtered. It was Muhammad. The world began to spin. I ran outside into the street. [She cries and bites her nails. She fans her fingers out and looks at them.] I called out to my husband again, not paying attention to the blood flowing from his eye. Looking at the corpses, he grew pale and fainted.
I ran around the courtyard screaming and screaming, seeing my children’s bodies. Blood covered my uncle’s face, but he was still breathing, choking out his words. He pointed at my children. I didn’t understand what he was saying. I was running from one edge of the courtyard to another, then I stopped. When my eyes landed on Usaid and Ezzedine, I lost all control. They told me afterward that Usaid had been playing the helicopter game with him, carrying his brother in the air to make him fly when the missile hit them both. The bodies of my children – Usaid, Ezzedine, and Rahma – were next to their grandfather’s. I only saw my children. I couldn’t even hear the voices of those injured around me seeking help. I stood next to my children – Usaid was lying lifeless, Rahma had a huge gash in her back. An elderly man carried Ezzedine in front of me. I couldn’t look at him. My other daughter, Mawadda, was injured – she had been with her twin, Rahma, when the missile hit. Her sister flew through the air right before her eyes.
Mawadda is still in shock. She has lost her twin, her lifelong playmate. She was pierced by shrapnel and still hasn’t got any better – she’s always in her own world. When she sees a stranger in our house, she hides. She doesn’t want her sister’s name to be said in her presence, and when she plays with the children in the neighbourhood she avoids anyone who mentions Rahma. She refuses to go to the school where she and her sister studied together. The one day she went, she came home in tears.
I visit my children in the cemetery whenever I get the chance, but I’m still not convinced they’re dead. Living in memories is painful, because you realise that no matter what you do, they’ve become just that – memories, no longer real life. My husband hid their photos. He doesn’t want me to see them because I’ll cry, and that will be the end of him. But I was able to get some from a friend and have hidden them away. I’ll never forget my children. Every day I curse the militia – they’ve robbed me of my children and now I only see them in my dreams. I don’t want anyone to visit me. I just want to cry alone.
As told by Ahmad Abdel Hameed Sayf, from al-Qutay, a village in the western governorate of Hodeidah. On 26 January 2017 at 5.40pm, Arab coalition aeroplanes attacked the house of Ahmad’s brother, Fahmi Abdel Hameed Sayf, in al-Qutay. Fahmi’s wife, Asma Abdel Qader Yassin Sharaf (30), was killed, as were three of their children – Muhammad Fahmi Abdel Hameed Sayf (12), Malak Fahmi Abdel Hameed Sayf (3), and Malakat Fahmi Abdel Hameed Sayf (1 1/2) – along with another girl, Nisreen Hassan Zayd Muhammad (10), three women, and two of their neighbour Abdel Kareem Abdel Hameed’s children. Fahmi and Asma’s son Ammar Fahmi Abdel Hameed Sayf (8) was injured and his left leg was amputated. SabaFon, the mobile phone company that was the nominal target of the attack, refused to compensate the families or pay for any treatment.
It had to be a horror movie. It was unreal. A movie with no sound or actors. One that directed itself, only about a second long, and which only I saw: missiles flying, arriving from the west, falling, then hitting my brother’s house. I always pause at that moment, playing it over in my head, speeding it up at times to see for myself what happened afterward. At other times I pause it, then let it play in slow motion until the details are etched in my memory. I interfere in the movie, freezing the missiles and pausing time itself, again and again. The nights when I see my brother sad and silent, and my attempts to console him are of no avail, I imagine that I’d had the power to stop those missiles, or that the universe had stepped in at that very moment with an earthquake or a hurricane, something bigger than us all, making those missiles explode in midair before they had the chance to destroy our lives.
But now I think about how missiles don’t just fall from the sky. There’s a mind behind them, a villain who presses the button to lock in a target – my brother’s home – killing women and children. Look around you. There’s nothing here in al-Qutay, nothing. [He falls silent.] Just scattered homes of poor families, a repair shop, a market. No military barracks, patrols, militia or even armed men. For years it’s only been us living here. We’ve had nothing to do with the war, we’ve tried to live in peace. But then they came here with their missiles and killed my brother’s family. [He takes out a cigarette and smokes.]
Some days later I heard what some people were saying and lost it. They were saying that the coalition’s missiles had targeted the SabaFon antenna next to my brother’s house. Liars. Bastards. If that were true then the coalition should have warned the residents: “Listen up you fools, we’re going to blow up this damn useless aerial.” We would have then immediately picked up our children and run away with our families to the desert. But the antenna wasn’t touched – the missile fell on my brother’s house, which had been the target all along.
I don’t know what made me stop at that moment. In the movie in my head, I don’t stop, but what actually happened was different. Fear seized my body when I saw death before my eyes. I froze and thought of what was going to happen. My brother was next to me, but he was looking in another direction. I don’t know where I got the strength. I held Fahmi tight in my arms, so that he wouldn’t see, but when he turned around he saw the explosion and the smoke rising from his house. He struggled against me, I hugged him tighter and let him cry, his body was shaking in my arms. Some friends came and helped me stabilise him. “Keep an eye on him,” I said. “I’ll go and have a look.” I was afraid he’d hurt himself. [He cries and puts out his cigarette.]
I was the first to go into the house, alone. I didn’t think about the roof, which could have fallen in at any moment. What I saw was horrific. I couldn’t get any closer – I stood where I was, in the middle of it all, not aware of what was around me. After some time, a few families arrived together, carrying away pieces of furniture and other things. They were ransacking the house. I couldn’t stop them, I was numb. [He cries.] I didn’t pay attention to Fahmi – I was staring at the burned bodies, the crushed bodies, the dismembered bodies, the distorted bodies, some of which had been flung outside the house because the blast had been so powerful.
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First, I saw some neighbours and a child from our area, and then, on the opposite side, my sister-in-law, her young son, Muhammad, and her two daughters, Malak and Malakat. When I saw Malakat dead, her feet and hands missing, my tears started to fall. Oh, Malakat! Oh darling, I wish I had taken you with me. That day she wouldn’t leave my side. She had told me: “Ammu, take me with you.” I carried her with me and took her out to the shop, then dropped her off back home. The missile hit minutes later. [He cries bitterly.] My brother’s screams that day, the missile whistling in the air and then falling on his house, the smoke, the burned bodies. These are the images that have kept me awake for months. Sometimes, I dream of the moment just before the missile fell, and in those dreams I always manage to stop it. My brother is still tormented – he can’t sleep, he can’t forget. He’s preoccupied with finding treatment for his injured son.
I carry my brother’s sorrows. I enter the house and the memories come rushing back. I remember my brother’s children and his wife, their laughter, the noise they would make, our beautiful life together. Damn the coalition and whoever came with them to our country, damn every side that has murdered Yemeni people. They’re all just that – murderers.
Who will bring back Malak, Malakat, Muhammad and Asma to my brother?
Who? Tell me who? Who?
As told by Sabah Abda Ahmad Fare, from the Erat Hamdan area of Sana’a. On 2 June 2015 at 5.30pm, Arab coalition aeroplanes targeted Sabah’s house. Two of Sabah’s children – Noura Ali Ahmad Muhammad al-Qabali (19) and Shuhab Ali Ahmad Muhammad al-Qabali (5) – were killed. Her daughter’s friends Lubna Sultan and Ishraq al-Zaifi were also killed. Four of her neighbor Qaid al-Atmi’s children were killed: Rudaina al-Atmi, Ameera al-Atmi, Abdo al-Atmi and Adeeb al-Atmi. The coalition destroyed Sabah’s house, which her husband, Ali Ahmad Muhammad al-Qabali, had built himself.
It was just like any other day, except my daughter’s friends were over. I remember how happy she was to have them there; she hadn’t seen them for months. I looked intently at her radiant face, a mother mesmerised by her only daughter, shortly to be engaged. Two days earlier, her aunt had asked for Noura’s hand for her son. “I’ll think about it,” Noura had said. That day I wanted to give her and her friends some privacy. I told Noura: “I’m going over to Um Lubna’s, make sure to call Shuhab inside if it looks like rain.”
At 4.15pm, I heard the planes overhead and told myself: “Maybe they’ll bomb Jabal Nuqum or Erat Hamdan – the highest points near us – like they have before.” In that moment, I remembered my son Shuhab, and how scared he’d get from the sound of the planes. Whenever he heard them, he’d yank on my neck and I’d get impatient, saying: “You’re choking me Shuhab, you’re choking me ibni.” In his trembling voice he’d respond: “Mama, I’m holding you tight so you don’t get scared.”
My neighbour Um Lubna told me: “Don’t worry, Shuhab’s probably inside now.” Then the windows exploded and shards of glass flew around us. Um Lubna’s house filled with smoke. “I’ll have a look outside and check on Shuhab,” her sister said. And then: “Khala! Your house isn’t there.” [She falls silent.]
Can you imagine? Your house and everyone in it, just gone, swallowed whole by the earth. When I saw the remains of my house through their window frame, I was unable to speak. I don’t remember how I held myself together, how I crossed the few metres to where the house had been, replaced now by a hole 6 metres deep. All I remember are the limbs, the plane circling above our heads, the smoke everywhere, and me in shock, staring at what was left of my home, and of my neighbour’s, which had been partly destroyed.
Faces passed by in front of me. Limbs, corpses. My son Khalid dug to get his siblings out. He held a small foot and my legs gave way. It was Shuhab’s leg – it definitely was. This wasn’t simply a mother’s intuition: I recognised the black trousers and jacket I’d dressed him in that morning.
I walked aimlessly, leaving behind what had been our home. One of the neighbourhood women saw me and took me to a clinic nearby. The clinic was full of injured people. I saw my other neighbour, who had been pulled from the rubble. She was mourning her four children who had been killed. I held her in my arms and repeated to myself the truth of what happened. She was rambling, repeating her children’s names.
I didn’t yell like other mothers who’ve lost their children. I didn’t strike my face in lament. I refused to look at my children’s limbs. I stood silent that day among the rubble, looking at what was no longer there. Steadfastness took root in that moment, washing over me like cool water. In that moment, when I sat in front of the remains of my home, where everything I had was gone, steadfastness forced me to face reality, to remember Noura as I had last seen her, laughing, happy with her friends, and Shuhab, playing, singing, unafraid of the plane that would kill him.
You have no idea how much steadfastness can give you when disaster strikes. Strength, perhaps; maybe numbness, as my sister says. But I dream that one day I’ll be with Noura and Shuhab, and that we’ll be in another beautiful home.
Three days after the bombing, I wanted to see what had once been my home. I just stared at the hole that had swallowed up my family and lost myself in the memories of time past, sheltered by the home my husband toiled for years to build. A place to protect us from the elements, the home that was no longer, the home that had become a hole.
In my mind, I look into the heart of the hole. I remember our life in the disappeared house, and Noura, how happy she was, how cherished she was, how everyone loved her. Her whole life had been in front of her. I remember Shuhab playing in the hallways. I remember life as perfect and complete. Wordless, I go on looking and looking, down into the hole.
Translated by Sawad Hussain. A longer version of this piece appears in this month’s n+1. What Have You Left Behind?: Voices from a Forgotten War by Bushra al-Maqtari is published by Fitzcarraldo on 19 October, and available at guardianbookshop.co.uk
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