'Houthis kill 814 women in Yemen’

By Gulsen Topcu

ADEN, Yemen

Houthi rebels have killed hundreds of women since the start of Yemen’s civil war, the country’s human rights minister said Wednesday.

The official SABA news agency cited Mohammed Askar as saying that the Houthi militia killed 814 women and injured 4,179 in the period from September 2014 until May 2018.

Askar was speaking at a seminar in Geneva under the slogan "How to Save and Protect Women and Children in the Yemeni Crisis".

The Houthi rebels’ violations against women in Yemen included murder, injury, humiliation, sexual violence, detention, psychological torture, forced displacement and other abuses, the minister added.

While explaining the dimension of Houthi violations against women, Askar recalled that Reham al-Badr, a member of a human rights violation research commission and human rights activist, was shot dead by a Houthi sniper in the besieged city of Taiz in early February.

He also touched on Houthi violations against children at the seminar, according to the SABA report.

The children "fall into six categories of serious crimes: murder, mutilation, exposure to danger including by their conscription into the military, abduction, deprivation of food aid and sexual violence,” SABA cited the minister as saying.

He noted that Houthi members had planted landmines in Yemen despite the international prohibition of this practice and the mines had killed or injured hundreds of civilians, most of whom were women and children.

Impoverished Yemen has been wracked by violence since 2014, when Shia Houthi rebels overran much of the country, including the capital, Sanaa.

The conflict escalated in 2015 when Saudi Arabia and its Sunni-Arab allies, who accuse the Houthis of serving as a proxy force for Shia Iran, launched a massive air campaign in Yemen aimed at rolling back Houthi gains.

The following year, UN-sponsored peace talks held in Kuwait failed to end the destructive conflict.

The violence has devastated Yemen’s basic infrastructure, including water and sanitation systems, prompting the UN to describe the situation as one of “the worst humanitarian disasters in modern times”.