All along the main street, buildings are crumpled beyond recognition, roofs punched in and pancaked. Historic mud-brick houses in its walled old city are pounded to dust. Saada, the birthplace of Yemen’s Shiite rebels, has been one of the most densely bombed cities in Yemen during the past 19 months of airstrikes by Saudi Arabia and its allies.
Residents are now struggling to bring some signs of life back to the city, high in the mountains of Yemen’s north.
The bombardment here eased relatively in recent months; the coalition may have hit everything worth hitting in the city, residents theorize, so some of the thousands who fled during the past year have decided to take their chances and return home.
But they are dealing with devastated infrastructure – a single, overburdened hospital, almost no electricity – and constant fear. The nearby countryside is still often hit by strikes, and Saudi-backed militias threaten a ground assault on the area. Drivers avoid coming close to pickup trucks carrying rebel fighters, fearing a missile may come streaking down.
“The more crowded a place is, the more we are afraid of bombings,” said Naglaa Fathi, a 15-year-old girl whose family returned recently. After bombings in May 2015 shattered the houses around theirs, her family fled to Khamr, a town further south. But they were tired of moving from house to house.
Now they’re back in their home in Saada’s Old City, though her parents moved out of their bedroom because “every time we look from the window, we see destruction,” her mother Samira Mohammed said.
The destruction is extensive. In just the first weeks of the airstrikes in early 2015, around 1,170 structures were damaged or destroyed in Saada, according to the United Nations. As bombardment continued for more than a year, an estimated 40 percent of Saada’s 50,000 residents fled. Many of those who remained literally dug holes in the ground to hide in and moved schools and hospitals into caves for protection.
It was here in Saada that the Shiite rebel movement known as the Houthis was born.
The city for centuries has been a center of the Zaydi branch of Shia Islam, which is found almost only in Yemen and makes up at least a third of the country’s population. Saada was the seat of power of Imam al-Hadi Yahia, a 10th century religious leader who set up a Zaydi dynasty.
The Houthis arose when Hussein Badr Eddin al-Houthi founded a Zaydi revivalist movement known as the Believing Youth in response to the spread of Saudi Arabia’s hard-line Wahhabi interpretation of Sunni Islam. He was killed by government forces in 2004, and his followers launched an insurgency. Yemen’s strongman president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, waged a string of wars in Saada trying in vain to defeat the Houthis.
Then Saleh was ousted following a 2011 popular uprising. Three years later, the Houthis came storming out of the north and took over the capital, Sanaa, now allied with Saleh and the army units still loyal to him. Saudi Arabia and its allies launched their air campaign in early 2015 to defend the internationally recognized president, Abed-Rabbo Mansour Hadi. The coalition and the United States accuse Iran of arming the rebels, a claim Tehran and the Houthis deny.