Yemen's Taiz under siege as Houthis advance, displacing thousands

A soldier crouches beside the road in southwestern Yemen and points upward. "That's the first drone," he says quietly. "An attack usually follows." The buzzing grows louder. Everyone takes cover under the bushes. Within ten minutes, the thuds begin—one after another, strikes landing somewhere in the distance, their exact location impossible to determine from the ground. This is the front line near Taiz, where the landscape offers no clear boundary between government-held territory and the advancing positions of Houthi fighters.

On September 10, the Houthis seized the port of Mokha, 85 kilometers west of Taiz, breaking a ceasefire that had held for four years. With that capture came control of territory overlooking the Bab al-Mandab Strait, one of the world's most critical shipping corridors. Oil prices rose as traders calculated the risk of further disruption to supplies flowing between Europe and Asia. The offensive has now turned toward Taiz itself, Yemen's third-largest city and its cultural heart, home to close to a million people. Government forces hold the city center, but Houthi positions now ring it from the north and east, with the fiercest recent fighting concentrated on the western approaches—the high ground that overlooks the road south. If the Houthis consolidate control there, the path to retaking Mokha becomes far steeper for the government side.

The journey to Taiz from the southern city of Aden passes through roughly thirty checkpoints, each marking territory controlled by a different commander. The fragmentation is visible in the landscape itself. As the city draws closer, ambulances begin appearing on the road—at least five within a half hour, all heading toward the main hospital. After dark, Taiz presents a strange duality. Shops are lit, restaurants are full, children play in the streets. Then the sounds break through: the thud of shelling from the mountains, the crack of gunfire echoing off the slopes. A government soldier who had just returned from positions high on the mountain, only a few hundred meters from advancing Houthis, described a grim reality. Eighteen bodies of government soldiers lay in an area his unit could see but not reach. "We shoot over them, but we can't pull them out," he said.

At al-Thawra hospital in Taiz, every bed in the intensive care unit was occupied. Some patients were fighters; others were civilians caught in the crossfire. Twelve-year-old Ghana Nabeel had been herding goats when shrapnel from a Houthi mortar struck her head. She lay unconscious, her face swollen and bruised, bandages wrapped around her skull. A doctor explained that the injury had damaged her brain. "She will never be the same again," he said. Her family waited at her bedside, uncertain what her life would look like if she woke.

Twenty kilometers south of Taiz, at the al-Monig displacement camp, hundreds of tents now shelter families who fled the fighting. Two hundred families arrived in just the previous ten days. Maryam Saleh, who came from Mokha a week earlier with her husband and five children—the youngest only seven years old—sat weaving a hat to sell so she could buy food for that day. "We walked barefoot and we didn't carry anything with us, just our children," she said. Her nephew was killed by shrapnel from a mortar as they fled. She described clashes and sniping both ahead and behind the family as they moved, and then armed men appearing on the mountain. "We thought we were finished," she said. The children screamed and cried, but the family kept walking.

Fatma Mohammed Saleh lay on an empty rice sack outside another family's tent. She has a disability and cannot walk. When fighting reached her village, she told her two sons and their children to run without her, knowing she would slow them down. She spent the next two days crawling on her hands and knees through the crossfire. "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." A man on a motorbike eventually found her and brought her to the camp. She has not seen her family since.

On September 22, the UN refugee agency reported that more than 130,000 people had been displaced across Yemen in just that month alone, adding to the 5.2 million already displaced by the civil war. The agency warned that another 100,000 could be forced from their homes over the next three months. Ali, a man sitting outside his home about one kilometer from the front line with a herd of goats, had sent his children to a displacement camp because they could no longer endure the shelling and gunfire. He stayed behind with his wife and sisters to care for the 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, fearful of what might happen if the Houthis took control of the area in the days ahead. Houthi contacts told the BBC they were consolidating troops and preparing for a major offensive. Government forces said they were aware and preparing as well.