Yemen's renewed fighting forces children from classrooms into labor camps

Muneer Farie was thirteen and had a plan. Each morning he sat in a classroom in al-Wazeyah district, in Yemen's Taiz province, absorbing lessons with the seriousness of someone who meant to be the first teacher his family had ever produced. His afternoons belonged to his father's livestock. It was a divided day, but it was his, and it held a future.

Two weeks before late September, the sound of the future changed. Explosions began echoing through the classroom walls. Gunfire crackled closer. The fighting that had held roughly in place for four years—since a UN-brokered ceasefire took hold in 2022—had suddenly broken open again. Iran-aligned Houthi forces had launched a fresh military campaign, moving rapidly southwest, seizing towns along the Red Sea coast and battling Saudi-backed government forces for control of the strategic highlands around Taiz. Muneer's village sat directly in the path.

"We heard there was fighting in surrounding areas but we didn't expect it would reach our village that fast," he said later. "As soon as the sounds of clashes approached our village, we took our livestock and important belongings and fled home early in the morning." He and his family moved southwest to al-Shimayateen, to a displacement camp. They arrived with nothing—no money, no supplies, no plan beyond survival.

Muneer joined more than 130,000 people forced from their homes by the September escalation. He also joined the more than 3.2 million Yemeni children whose education had already been fractured by years of civil war. But this new displacement added a sharper edge to that statistic. Instead of a desk, Muneer now had a tent where he, his five siblings, and his parents crowded together through humid nights. Instead of homework, he and his brother sold cheap socks and other goods in the markets outside the camp. His father, Ghaleb Farie, had made the calculation that survival required his sons' labor. "Studying is important, but not in a situation like this where we are struggling to get enough food, water and other necessities," Muneer said. "For now, I will keep working until the war ends." His father held no illusions about how long that might be. Neighbors who had been displaced longer told him the first months would be the hardest, that he would adapt. New displaced people arrived at the camp every day.

For those still in their homes, the violence had become inescapable. Abdulwasea Abdu, principal of Musaab Ibn Umayr school in Taiz city, had kept his doors open as long as he could, trying to preserve some semblance of normal life for his more than 600 students. Two weeks into the fighting, a missile struck near the school. It exploded in view of the children. "We witnessed severe panic among them, with crying and screaming due to the explosions," Abdu said. "Some children showed psychological trauma as a result of the intensity of the blasts." The school closed. Abdu watched the battlefield developments closely, searching for any pause in the fighting that might allow classes to resume. The area was being attacked from multiple fronts—south, west, and north. There was no pause. He feared what would happen to these children if the closure stretched on: they would be forced into labor, the same trap closing around Muneer.

The fighting had severed the main road between Mocha, now controlled by the Houthis, and Taiz, held by the government. That road was one of the few in the region wide enough for large trucks and buses—the artery through which goods flowed. Without it, prices for basic supplies climbed sharply. Essam Nabil, a fifty-six-year-old carpenter in Taiz city, watched families give up meat and shift to cheaper foods. The blocked supply routes had turned a military conflict into an economic stranglehold on civilians. Even travel became a maze. Asaad, an expatriate worker in Saudi Arabia, could no longer take a direct route home. He now faced the expensive, exhausting journey he thought Yemen had moved past—traveling through Aden instead of taking the main road, repeating the arduous detours of the war's early years. The four years of relative stability had ended not with a whimper but with a cascade of closures: roads blocked, schools shuttered, children pulled from classrooms into survival work, prices climbing, routes lengthening. The fighting continued, and with each day, the displacement camps filled with more families arriving with nothing, and the calculation of what children could afford to do shifted further away from education and toward whatever work might keep them fed.