• Content warning – the following article contains graphic descriptions of war
The horrors of this conflict, and the lives it has taken, must not be kept hidden. As the bombs continue to fall around us, I have gathered these witness testimonies as a memory against forgetting
I reached Aden, the temporary capital of Yemen, in the second week of March 2015. Missiles shook the city from all sides. Houthi militias bombed the presidential palace, where President Hadi was holed up. Army tanks trundled down the main streets. On 23 March, the decision to go to war was made; diplomats and international employees left Sana’a, Yemen’s largest city, while foreign embassies closed their doors and evacuated their personnel. Leaders of political parties departed the country with their families. I said farewell to some of them in good faith. I didn’t think that – having sensed the war was coming – they had decided to flee and leave us to our fate.
Hadi fled the country on 25 March. That same day, a military coalition organised by Saudi Arabia in support of Hadi and against the Houthi uprising began airstrikes. (The coalition also included the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt, Senegal, Sudan, Qatar and Morocco.) At 2am on Thursday 26 March, Arab coalition fighter planes suddenly cut through the Sana’a sky and war became a reality. What’s engraved in my mind from that morning isn’t the roar of the explosions, or the horrifying thunder of planes piercing the sound barrier, or my anxiety over the trajectory of missiles hitting targets further than I could see, or the sounds of war that I had grown accustomed to. Rather, it is the shock of how war was conjured, how life collapsed in one fell swoop – civil infighting, the humiliation of hunger, the indignity of it all, our generation’s lost dreams.
