Inside Yemen's front-line city as Houthis battle for control

Inside Yemen’s frontline city as Houthis fight for control

“This is the first drone,” said the soldier travelling with us in south-western Yemen. “It’s usually followed by an attack.”

The buzzing overhead grew louder as we sheltered beneath the bushes, then got back into the vehicle and drove off.

Roughly 10 minutes later, a series of loud strikes followed, one after another, though it was not clear where they hit.

In the mountains south-west of Taiz, it is difficult to know exactly where the front line starts.

Saudi-backed pro-government forces are trying to push back Houthi fighters, who swept down the Red Sea coast earlier this month, seized a key shipping chokepoint and intensified Yemen’s civil war.

We travelled with government forces from Taiz through checkpoints to the point where their control ends and no man’s land begins, to see the fighting at close range.

Homes are dotted across the slopes, but many have been left empty after families fled the violence.

The area is hauntingly silent, without the cars or motorbikes that constantly race through the city. The only sounds are livestock bleating and incoming and outgoing fire.

“Two mortars landed here on my property,” said Ali, speaking outside his home with a herd of goats, about 1km (0.6 miles) from the front line.

He said he had sent his children to a displacement camp because they could no longer endure the shelling and gunfire. He remained with his wife and sisters to care for their animals.

“I am terrified,” he said, “but I have no choice, we will all go hungry without our animals and die anyway.”

He gave only his first name, worried about reprisals if the Houthis seize the area in the coming days. Contacts on the Houthi side told us they were building up troops and preparing for a major offensive. When we put this to government forces, they said they knew and were preparing too.

At the nearest checkpoint to the front line, we met fighters who had just come back from positions high on the mountain, only a few hundred metres from advancing Houthis. One said the bodies of 18 government soldiers were lying in an area his unit could fire over but could not reach.

“We shoot over them, but we can’t pull them out,” he said.

The fighting around Taiz has escalated since the Houthis captured the strategic Red Sea port of Mokha, 85km to the west, on 10 September, after a ceasefire that had mostly held for four years collapsed.

The group took control of a stretch of territory overlooking the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait – a vital shipping route linking Europe and Asia. That helped push oil prices higher as fears grew of further disruption to regional supplies.

Taiz is Yemen’s third-largest city and its cultural capital, home to nearly a million people. It lies at a crucial junction between Houthi-held areas in northern Yemen and government-held territory in the south – and is surrounded by front lines on several sides.

Government forces control central Taiz, while Houthi positions are to the north and east. The fiercest recent fighting has been on the western approaches, where both sides are contesting high ground overlooking the route south out of the city. If the Houthis take these areas, government forces could find it much harder to retake Mokha.

We travelled to Taiz from Aden in the south, where Yemen’s internationally recognised Presidential Leadership Council and government are based.

Around 30 checkpoints along the route marked sections of road controlled by different commanders – a clear sign of how fragmented the government side’s forces are.

As we approached the city, ambulances started passing us. We counted at least five in half an hour, heading to Taiz’s main hospital. It was obvious we were entering a city at the centre of a brutal battle.

We arrived after dark. The shops were lit up, the restaurants were full and children were playing in the streets. But every so often, other sounds cut through – the thud of shelling and the crack of gunfire from the mountains around the city.

Taiz has long been a major battlefield in the country’s devastating civil war. After driving the government out of Sanaa in 2015, the Houthis also tried to take Taiz, but were pushed out of most of the city by local militiamen.

Now, in their latest offensive, the Houthis are making heavy use of drones as well as other weapons.

According to Saudi Arabia, Western countries and UN experts, their main external supplier is Iran, which has provided weapons, funding and military advice. Iran has previously denied supplying weapons to the Houthis and says it supports them only politically.

There have been repeated reports over many years that the Houthis recruit child soldiers, and a government soldier told us he had faced them on the front line.

“It’s difficult to look at a Yemeni child and shoot at him. But then they are pointing the gun at you and you have to defend yourself,” he said.

The Houthis signed an “action plan” with the UN in 2022 promising to end the practice. The BBC has also spoken to teenagers serving with government forces.

Meanwhile, a Saudi-led coalition is backing the Yemeni government and supplying it with weapons. The Saudi military has carried out hundreds of air strikes on Houthi positions on the Red Sea coast, while the Houthis have fired drones and missiles at cities and infrastructure in south-western Saudi Arabia.

That evening, at al-Thawra hospital in Taiz, casualties from the front lines were being brought into an intensive care unit where every bed we saw was occupied.

Some were fighters, others civilians. Twelve-year-old Ghana Nabeel had been herding goats when shrapnel hit her head. Her family said an incoming Houthi mortar had landed nearby.

She lay unconscious, her head bandaged, her face swollen and bruised. Her family waited at her bedside to find out what life might be like if she wakes up.

A doctor told me the wound had damaged her brain. “She will never be the same again,” he said.

About 20km south of Taiz, at the al-Monig displacement camp, families who had fled Mokha and villages hit by fighting were arriving among hundreds of tents.

We were told that 200 families had arrived in the previous 10 days.

Maryam Saleh, not her real name, arrived a week earlier from Mokha with her husband and five children. The youngest is seven. Maryam sat weaving a hat to sell so she could buy food for the day.

“We walked barefoot and we didn’t carry anything with us, just our children,” she told me.

She said her nephew was killed by mortar shrapnel as they fled. He had been walking behind her. She described clashes and sniping both in front of and behind the family and said she then saw armed men on the mountain.

“We thought we were finished,” she said. The children were screaming and crying, but the family kept walking, she added.

Fatma Mohammed Saleh was lying on an empty rice sack outside another family’s tent. She has a disability and cannot walk, and said she had nowhere of her own to sleep: “I have nothing… no shelter, no mattress, no family. Nothing.”

Fatma said she had been with her two sons and their children when the fighting reached their village. But she was slowing them down, so she told them to take the children and run.

She said she spent the next two days crawling on her hands and knees.

“I was crawling and the bullets are coming from here and the shells are there. And the bullets are here, and the shells are here. And above me it was like thunder. I was praying to God.”

She said a man on a motorbike then saw her and took her to the camp. She has not seen her family since.

On 22 September, the UN refugee agency said more than 130,000 people had been displaced across Yemen so far this month, in addition to the 5.2 million already displaced by the civil war.

It warned that another 100,000 could – like Fatma – be forced from their homes over the next three months.