Hisham Yahya, 13, is an eager student. As we sat in the large, empty yard of his school in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, with weapon debris scattered about, he said he missed going to class. “I just sit at home, it is so boring, and we have no electricity, nothing,” he said. “I want to go back to school so I can start learning again.”
It doesn’t look like Hisham’s school will be up and running again any time soon.
On March 26, the first day of airstrikes by a Saudi-led international coalition against the Houthi rebels who control the capital and much of the rest of the country, Yemen’s Education Ministry suspended all classes in Sanaa. Many other areas subject to coalition attacks and fighting between the Houthis and other armed groups soon followed suit.
Across Yemen, 3,600 schools—76 percent of the country’s total—have closed due to insecurity, according to the United Nations. As a result, about 1.85 million children cannot take this year’s final exams.
The school closures not only harm children’s access to education but make children more susceptible to recruitment by the many armed groups and tribal militias in Yemen that continue to use child soldiers.
Eighty-one schools have also been damaged in the fighting, UNICEF said. Hisham’s school, the Bilal primary school for boys in the Nuqum neighborhood, escaped relatively lightly, mostly with broken windows. It was damaged on May 11, when a coalition airstrike hit an arms depot on nearby Nuqum Mountain. Thirty-eight civilians were killed, including six children.
During a temporary cease-fire in mid-May, my colleague and I visited three other schools in Sanaa that had been damaged from airstrikes. At the Ibn Sina secondary school for girls, we saw broken windows and a damaged facade. Three airstrikes had destroyed two nearby homes, injuring one man. Local residents thought the school was the intended target because the Houthis had been using it as a base for food distribution.
Some residents thought that the Houthis might have used the school to store weapons, but we found no signs of that. Others said they had checked the school the morning before the strike and directly after it—and each time found no weapons.
