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Fighters in Marib
Photo: ALI OWIDHA / REUTERS
“We hear the fighting every night.
It's scary, feels like a big monster is slowly approaching the city, ”says Maged al-Madhaji.
The political analyst is these days in Marib, a city in Yemen that has so far been spared the civil war.
But now a fierce battle is raging over Marib.
“When I'm out and about in Marib during the day and see the people on the streets, in the markets and the children going to school,” says al-Madhaji, “then I think about the fact that all these men, women and children have been around for a year and a half Experience the same horror every night for months, hear the din of the war from which they fled here. "
Civil war has been raging in Yemen since 2015, and the UN estimates that more than 230,000 people have died.
The longer the war lasts, the lower the interest of the world public, which was never particularly pronounced because of the confusing situation.
One of the decisive battles of the war is now taking place in Marib.
And a bloodbath threatens:
The city is controlled by allies of the internationally recognized Yemeni government.
For weeks you have been fighting bitterly against an offensive by the Shiite Houthi militia.
This dominates large parts of North Yemen, including the capital Sanaa.
Marib is the only significant area in the north that the Houthi have not been able to conquer until now.
In mid-February, the militia launched their most intense attacks to date on Marib.
But the first major offensive began over a year ago.
Since then, over 17,000 soldiers are said to have died on the part of the government.
At least that is what Sultan al-Aradah, the governor of Marib, said in a video briefing to journalists on Monday.
If the city with its rich oil and gas reserves were to fall, many believe that the Houthi would have won the year-long war in Yemen.
From a desert nest to an economic center
For a long time, Marib was an oasis for internally displaced people, surrounded by war and misery.
The bustling governor Aradah, who is also a powerful tribal leader, used the collapse of the central state to expand local autonomy:
He had the public infrastructure expanded with the help of the income from local gas and oil deposits.
The province owes its own irrigation systems to the dam of Marib - in a country where water is a scarce commodity.
Since the beginning of the war six years ago, the former desert nest of Marib has also grown into a populous economic center.
Refugee camps have sprung up like mushrooms on the outskirts of the provincial capital;
there are a total of 139 camps made up of living containers and tents.
According to official information, the province of Marib now has 2.8 million inhabitants, most of them live in the provincial capital of the same name.
With this in mind, it is not surprising that the Houthis want to control these resources.
The journalist Abdullah al-Mansuri from Sanaa is one of those internally displaced people who fear for their new home because of the Houthi offensive.
He lives in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Marib.
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Abdullah al-Mansuri with his wife, the wife of his imprisoned brother, children of the two of them and his mother at the Marib Book Fair
Photo: Abdullah al-Mansuri
Here he has built a modest new existence with his wife, children and mother;
the father died of Corona last year.
In addition to war and hunger, the pandemic also claims its victims in the poorest Arab country.
Displaced persons from another camp near the front line have had to flee for the second time because of an advance by the Houthi and set up their tents in a new location.
"My wife and children didn't turn a blind eye for fear"
“Not a day goes by without a moment of horror.
When we hear a rocket hit somewhere, memories come back of how we escaped death, ”he says.
“When the fighting escalated a few days ago, we had a terrible night.
We heard the gunfire, the bombing.
My wife and children didn't turn a blind eye to fear, and I just couldn't calm them down. "
Abdullah al-Mansuri refers to the night of February 27th when the Houthis launched an attack on Balaq Mountain - a key strategic position because from there you overlook the Marib Dam.
The Houthi have not yet succeeded in taking the Balaq Mountain.
But in a single night, hundreds of Houthi opponents were killed.
One of them was the powerful general Abdulghani Shaalan, also known as Abu Mohammed.
His special force is considered to be the most powerful unit in all of Marib.
“They came out of nowhere.
You hardly saw them, but as soon as there was an alarm somewhere, they rushed in from all directions with their pickup trucks, armed to the teeth, ”recalls a local contact.
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Men pray at the tomb of Abdulghani Shaalan
Photo: ALI OWIDHA / REUTERS
In addition, Abu Mohammed was probably behind a network of notorious secret prisons and informants with whom he excavated Houthi spy cells - and made people disappear.
"In every neighborhood I see a picture of a new martyr hanging"
On the Houthi side, the losses may be even greater.
A gravedigger in Sanaa said on the phone that he had never been so busy since the war began.
A school principal reports that the Houthi asked him to recruit students for the fight.
You have to fill the ranks.
And a human rights activist from Marib, who is temporarily in Sanaa and does not want to give his name out of fear of the Houthi ruling there, says: “In every district I see a picture of a new martyr hanging.
Whenever I turn on the local radio, no matter which channel, I hear war propaganda for Marib.
You speak of a fight against evil, against foreign occupiers, or against Daish. "
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Daish is the Arabic abbreviation for the extremists of the "Islamic State" (IS).
"The truth is, it is a war between Yemenis and hundreds perished on both sides," says the human rights activist.
"We have no other place to go"
The two million internally displaced persons in Marib come from all parts of the country.
And they have brought new life to the once sleepy desert city.
“Today women run in the streets, you can see them on the buses and at the universities.
Before, it was considered immoral for women to move in public here, «says the anonymous human rights activist.
When the journalist al-Mansuri and his family settled in the al-Jufaina camp on the southern outskirts of the city, there were only a handful of tents and residential units there.
Now every square meter has been built up.
"We have nowhere else to go," says al-Mansuri.
"Sanaa is not a safe place for us." In 2015, the Houthi arrested a number of journalists in the capital, including a brother of al-Mansuri.
His own name also appeared on a list of wanted people.
He was lucky that by then he had already fled to southern Yemen, to the port city of Aden, where there is a strong separatist movement.
The Houthi are brutal against critics and independent voices.
Al-Mansuri's brother is one of four journalists imprisoned in Sana'a who were recently sentenced to death in a mock trial.
If the Houthi took Marib, he would be in danger again - and the militia would have the most important parts of North Yemen under their control.
The Yemeni government would be lost between the Houthi in the north and the separatists in the south.
However, the analyst al-Madhaji does not assume that the city will be conquered.
The resistance is too strong.
The anonymous human rights activist from Marib also believes this: »To do this, they would have to kill all their opponents.
When the Houthi took the district of Madghil about 50 kilometers outside the city, all residents fled.
The Houthi conquered empty houses.
There is no acceptance of their rule in Marib. "
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