ADEN, Sept 15 (Reuters) – After a drone strike sent shrapnel flying into his wife’s chest, killing her, Muhammad Aiyash and his three children fled with no belongings to a new makeshift camp for the displaced in the southern Yemeni city of Aden.
Panic has spread as Yemen’s Houthis trounced Saudi-backed government forces in a lightning offensive along the country’s Red Sea coast that has enabled the Iran-aligned militants to seize another part of the country and tighten their grip over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, one of the world’s most important shipping routes for goods and commodities, including oil.
“By God, we do not possess even a single grain of flour. We have no mattresses and no clothes,” said Aiyash, who is in his 60s and left his home behind in the ancient port city of Mocha in a desperate search for shelter in Yemen’s latest crisis.
The U.N. refugee agency said on Tuesday that more than 100,000 people had been internally displaced by the renewed conflict in Yemen, and that thousands more have fled by sea to Djibouti.
The Houthis, mountain fighters who often wear sandals and enjoy the national pastime of chewing the stimulant green leaf qat, have emerged over the years into a military force of tens of thousands.
In the latest round of fighting they have extended their control from the northern, most populous areas of Yemen, to cities and towns and islands in the west.
They have also opened a new area of combat in the Iran war, increasing pressure on global energy markets following the earlier effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
The Houthis have attacked targets inside Saudi Arabia, which has been forced to temporarily close the vital East-West pipeline that had served as an alternative to shipping through Hormuz.
‘THE WAR CAME SUDDENLY’
At the Aden camp, families sat beside tents, tending sheep and trying to assemble rudimentary shelters. Children stayed close to their parents as adults carried belongings.
One displaced man, Tawfiq al-Kharij, showed a shrapnel injury to his leg as he sat with relatives outside a tent. He said he escaped with nothing but the clothes he was wearing.
“We were living peacefully in God’s care, then the war came suddenly,” Kharij said. “Some died, and others survived.”
UNHCR said on Tuesday that humanitarian access remained “a major challenge”.
“Insecurity, damaged roads, telecommunications disruptions and movement restrictions are affecting operations,” the agency said in a statement.
Khadija Kudaf and her children had to walk for three days to get to Aden, a port city. “We didn’t even bring the children’s clothes,” she said.
Yemenis are all too familiar with suffering.
The Arab world’s most impoverished country has been mired in conflict since the Houthis seized the capital, Sanaa, in 2014, prompting a Saudi-led military intervention the following year in a civil war that led to one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crises. The Houthis withstood years of heavy Saudi-led bombing during the civil war.
A U.N.-brokered truce in 2022 largely halted major fighting, despite expiring six months later, but efforts to turn it into a lasting political settlement have stalled as regional tensions have intensified.
In Taiz province, northwest of Aden, another newly erected camp has begun to receive people fleeing fighting. Women and children carried water in jerrycans at the camp, while others washed clothes and gathered around tents.
A displaced woman there, Taghreed Salem, said families were struggling to find basic supplies.
“We arrived fleeing from the war, from the shells, from the missiles, from the aircraft that strike,” Salem said. “We came as newly displaced people. We want water, we want anything from them,” she said.
(Additional reporting by Emma Farge in Geneva; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Aidan Lewis)
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