Women who dare dissent targeted for abuse by Yemen’s rebels

CAIRO — Samera al-Huri’s fellow activists were disappearing, one by one. “This is the darkest age for Yemeni women,” said Rasha Jarhum, founder of the Peace Track Initiative, which lobbies for women’s inclusion in peace talks between the Houthis and Yemen’s internationally recognized government. Al-Huri said when she rejected a Houthi official’s request to snitch on other activists, she was abducted in July 2019 by a dozen masked officers with Kalashnikovs, “as though I was Osama bin Laden.” She was imprisoned in Dar al-Hilal, an abandoned school on Taiz Street. A fellow detainee, Bardis Assayaghi, a prominent poet who circulated verses about Houthi repression, counted around 120 women held there, “schoolteachers, human rights activists, teenagers.” She said officers banged her head against a table so hard that she needed eye surgery to see properly when released months later. In Yemen’s patriarchal society, survivors of sexual assault are often ostracized, sometimes even killed by relatives to preserve family “honor.” Women are set free only after pledging to stop protesting or posting on social media, and after they videotape confessions to prostitution and espionage.