By: Abdul Salam al-Hatimi

The terrorist Houthi militia continues to commit various crimes and violations that target different groups of society and acts in this context such as a person who is safe from punishment, deterrence and rebuke. The silence of the international community regarding the militia's terrorist practices has encouraged it, which reflects the crisis of human conscience and double standards in defending human rights and confronting violent and terrorist groups by various means in order to limit their continued violations against innocent and defenseless civilians, as well as their undermining of the public peace, setting fires, waging wars, attacking neighboring countries and threatening international trade routes.

And when a person looks closely at the nature of terrorist crimes and flagrant violations of human rights committed by the Houthi militia, he will find that this militia, with these practices, is considered the worst and most horrific group of violence and terrorism in the entire world because no terrorist group has ever tortured its opponents in prisons to death, carrying out field executions, abducting women, imprisoning them and forcing them to commit acts contrary to religion and morals, assaulting children and sending them to the battlefronts and death incinerators, and other means of punishment and mass torture practiced by the Houthi militia in its areas of control, in areas close to the battlefronts and in besieged cities. And these violations have become daily practices to the extent that the local media and human rights organizations have been unable to fully track and monitor these violations.

And the question here is: Why all this silence on the part of the international community regarding the terrorist practices committed by the Houthi militia and its crimes against humanity? And if the scenes of the dead children and women victims of the indiscriminate bombing carried out by the Houthis do not motivate the global conscience, then what can move it? And what can the shy statements of condemnation, which are issued by human rights organizations from time to time, offer to the victims and which seem to be just droping a duty? And what remains of the crimes and terrorist practices that the Houthi militia did not commit to making the human conscience wake up from its slumber and move in defense of children, women and defenseless civilians and innocent people from the brutality of Houthi terrorism that does not observe religion, morals, or tribal customs?

- For the Houthis, terrorism is the only commodity:

Since the militia's coup against the legitimate authority in September 2014, the terrorist Houthi militia has not provided citizens with anything, and it has not been satisfied with that but has worked to destroy public services and deprive citizens of them, such as electricity, water and others. Likewise, the militia was not satisfied with looting the salaries of civil servants and the dismissal of those who did not work in their jobs for free or for half a salary every six months but rather it turned into a source of anxiety and permanent terror. The only thing the militia provided to the citizens was prisons, arrests, house raids, torture to death or permanent illnesses and infirmities, in addition to false and unfair trials and unjust and politicized death sentences.

And local and foreign human rights reports reveal staggering numbers regarding violations and war crimes committed by the Houthi militia in its areas of control and in areas of military confrontation, such as abducting women and torturing them in prisons, abducting children from schools and roads to recruit them and sending them to the battlefronts, restricting citizens, interfering in their privacy, exploding homes, mosques, and Koranic schools, burning farms, looting public and private properties, and mining homes whose owners left to escape the inferno of battles.

The latest crimes of the terrorist Houthi militia were the killing of 12 people and throwing their bodies in the street a few days after their abduction in the south of the city of Hodeidah. And weeks before that, the Houthi militia besieged the Abdiya area in Marib in preparation for storming it, and after taking control of it, the militia began retaliatory practices against unarmed civilians, raiding many homes and blowing up some of them, and arrested dozens of people, including children, for interrogation on the pretext of obtaining information.

And among the most heinous crimes committed by the Houthi militia during the recent period, the execution of nine innocent people from the sons of Tihama on September 18, amid exhilaration of victory and takbeers (Allahu Akbar), and broadcasting the executions through satellite channels and large screens that had been installed at the place of execution and in a public square that has its historical symbolism.

Shocking statistics:

Last September, the organization of SAM for Rights and Liberties issued a report in which documenting about 26,000 human rights violations committed by the terrorist Houthi militia since the September 2014 coup.

In a statement issued entitled "The Great Collapse", the SAM organization said that the Houthi militia committed 25,997 human rights violations during the period from September 21, 2014, to August 2021.

And the organization's report revealed that 3,583 civilians were killed and 4,355 others were injured by the Houthi terrorist militia's fire, in addition to the killing and wounding of 1,523 civilians as a result of mines, most of which were planted by the Houthi militia.

And the organization reported that it had verified the arrest and disappearance of more than 9,810 people in prisons belonging to the Houthi militia, as well as the torture of 396 others.

It stated that it has documented more than 4,277 violations against childhood, ranging from killing, injury, recruitment, torture and arrest, and 889 violations against women, including murder, injury, arrest and trial, committed by the militia during the aforementioned period.

And the SAM organization pointed out that it had documented 267 violations against journalists and more than 897 violations against activists and human rights defenders committed by the Houthi militia.

The organization's report also revealed widespread violations that affected private facilities and institutions confiscated by the Houthi militia, such as telecommunications companies, hospitals, universities, civil institutions, charities and others.

Mass starvation and the manufacture of terrorism:

The Houthi militia takes starvation and the mass impoverishment of citizens as a weapon of terrorism from two sides: The first is in order for society to remain submissive and humiliated, looking for its livelihood and unable to resist the militia or demand improvement in its situation while it is on its empty stomach, and the second is to bargain citizens with food and foreign humanitarian aid in order to send their children to the fighting fronts in the ranks of the militias in return for obtaining the minimum amount of aid, meaning that the militia works to barter society for its livelihood to fuel its terrorist behavior by attracting new fighters into its ranks and sending them to the battlefronts and others, as well as mobilizing them sectarianly so that each of them turns into a terrorist project fueled by the criminal behavior of the Houthi militia.

And the Houthi militia has taken many means to impose mass starvation and impoverishment on all citizens in its areas of control, where it has suspended the activities of charitable societies and looted their headquarters, property and bank balances. It even prevented philanthropists from helping the poor and the hungry, and arrested any philanthropist and imprisoned him in case he distributed food baskets on a number of the poor. And several international reports talk about the Houthi militia looting humanitarian aid and using it to finance its war against the Yemeni people.

Government employees are considered one of the groups most affected by impoverishment and starvation, especially school teachers and university professors, where the Houthi militias began looting the salaries of employees in their areas of control since August 2016, who number more than one million and 200 thousand employees. In order to generalize poverty and hunger among all citizens, the Houthi militia looted government and private banks, as well as private sector companies and institutions such as telecommunications companies, hospitals, universities and others.

Practicing terrorism against childhood:

Children are considered among the groups most affected by the Houthi militia’s terrorism, as they are not only victims of forced conscription, but they are also victims of the indiscriminate bombing of the Houthis on residential neighborhoods and camps for the displaced.

And official statistics confirm that the Houthi militia has recruited more than 35,000 children since 2014, 17% of them are under the age of 11, while 6,729 children are fighting in the Houthi fronts. In addition, the terrorist militia has turned schools, mosques and summer camps into places to brainwash at least 60,000 children, train them and send them to the battlefronts.

And last March, a human rights report by the Yemeni human rights organization revealed shocking numbers of violations committed by the Houthi militia against Yemeni children, which amounted to 20,977 violations against children, in addition to the displacement of 43,608 children.

And the report made it clear that the violations committed by the Houthi militia against children ranged from killing, injuring, abduction, displacement, deprivation of education, sniping and recruitment, as well as preventing access to medical treatment, food and water as a result of the siege imposed on most of the Governorates it controls, in addition to using excessive force.

The Arab Network field team also documented the killing of 3,059 children, of whom 1,716 were killed in the confrontations while fighting in the ranks of the Houthi militia who were pushed into the fighting fronts by the militia, in addition to the injury of 4,734 children, including 3,114 who were thrown into the fighting fronts, and 321 children were effected with permanent disabilities, most of them due to Houthi mines.

And in late July, a report by the German network "Deutsche Welle" stated that the recruitment of children is undoubtedly one of the most disturbing human rights violations documented during the war in Yemen.

And in their annual report on children and armed conflict, published in May this year, UN researchers counted 211 cases of children recruited to fight in Yemen in 2020, of whom 134 were boys and 29 girls were recruited by the Houthis.

And last February, the organization of SAM for Rights and Liberties documented in its report the killing of more than 10,000 Yemeni children since 2014 and the beginning of the conflict. And the report stated that "the Houthis deliberately used the education system to incite violence and indoctrinate students with the group's ideologies."

And the organization reported that the Houthi militia runs about 6,000 summer camps, where this type of indoctrination takes place. And each summer camp accommodates at least 100 children per course and the children are given combat training and are often sent to the front lines.

And with regard to the crimes of the Houthi terrorist militia against women, statistics from human rights organizations confirm that the Houthis committed 668 murders against women and wounded 1,733 women, some of them seriously.

Unlimited Terror:

The terrorism of the Houthi militia does not stop at a certain point. Although its terrorism has threatened the interests of the world and the international trade routes passing through the Bab al-Mandab strait and the Red Sea, the international community has not taken serious positions regarding that terrorism, especially with regard to the floating Safir oil tank in the Red Sea near the port of Hodeidah, where the Houthi terrorist militia continues its intransigence and not allowing UN experts to examine and maintain the tank and unload its cargo of oil before it explodes and causes an environmental and marine disaster that will harm Yemenis, neighboring countries and other countries whose merchant ships pass through the Red Sea.

The international community continues to condone the intransigence of the terrorist Houthi militia and its rejection of all peace initiatives, whether those presented by the Arab Alliance led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United Nations or the United States and others. The militias also reject all calls for calm and to stop the military escalation in Marib and other fronts, and the international community continues to condone the siege of Taiz Governorate by the terrorist Houthi militias for the seventh year in a row, and the international community has not condemned the Houthis’ indiscriminate bombing of crowded cities and camps for displaced people with ballistic missiles, drones, artillery, direct sniping, and more.