Shocking Report: Over 15,000 Documented Houthi Crimes in Yemen's Dhamar, Including Child Soldiers and Mass Graves

"They came at night – for activists in their beds, for journalists at work, for children playing in streets. Now, after seven years of terror, Yemen's silenced victims finally have a voice. An explosive new human rights report has catalogued 15,413 specific acts of Houthi brutality in Dhamar alone, providing forensic evidence of what experts are calling 'a textbook case of crimes against humanity."

A Yemeni human rights organization has documented more than 15,400 violations committed by the Houthi militia in Dhamar Governorate between January 2018 and May 2025.

The Yemeni Network for Rights and Freedoms reported that the Iran-backed Houthi terrorist militia carried out 15,413 documented abuses, including killings, injuries, kidnappings, enforced disappearances, torture, bombings of civilian homes, looting of property, attacks on places of worship, forced child recruitment, landmine planting, and the establishment of illegal prisons and courts.

The report documented 474 civilian deaths, including 32 children and 12 women, along with 19 assassinations of social and political figures. It recorded 218 injuries, including 34 children and 9 women, and 1,183 abductions targeting activists, journalists, and educators. The militia forcibly disappeared 72 individuals and held 27 hostages, while 614 travelers were arbitrarily detained.

Torture was widespread, with 274 documented cases resulting in 12 deaths. The report exposed 65 secret prisons and 30 mass graves in the governorate. Property destruction included 39 bombed homes, 6 shops, 2 mosques, and a Quranic school, along with 1,304 forced home invasions and 150 looting incidents. The Houthis raided 109 government facilities and attacked 166 schools and 32 hospitals.

The militia forcibly recruited 4,481 children aged 12-16, of whom 2,019 were killed and 1,475 wounded in combat. They displaced 2,143 families and systematically suppressed free speech, kidnapping 65 journalists, censoring media 28 times, attacking journalists' families in 56 incidents, shutting down 5 newspapers, and banning all newspaper sales in Dhamar.

The Yemeni Network emphasized that these figures represent only verified cases, with many more violations going undocumented due to security threats against rights monitors. The report covers abuses documented from January 2018 through May 2025.