Yemen Insurgents Establish Training Camps for African Migrants

An African migrant on a bus in a Yemeni province. (United Nations)
An African migrant on a bus in a Yemeni province. (United Nations)
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Yemen Insurgents Establish Training Camps for African Migrants

An African migrant on a bus in a Yemeni province. (United Nations)
An African migrant on a bus in a Yemeni province. (United Nations)

Yemeni activists have accused the Houthi militias of establishing two training camps to recruit African migrants who arrive in Yemen, send them to battlefronts, and use them for intelligence tasks and contraband smuggling.

This coincides with ongoing campaigns by the Houthi preventive security apparatus to track and chase African migrants in Saadah. These campaigns have resulted in the kidnapping of 2,288 persons in various regions in the province as per the announcement of the group’s security media center.

Yemeni journalist and activist Fares al-Humairi stated that the militias have created two training camps, one in Saadah and another in the west of the Abs district of Hajjah governorate.

In a Facebook post, the Yemeni activist noted there were ties between the Houthis and smuggling networks that are using border regions in Saadah (the stronghold of the group) to smuggle people, the khat plant, and contraband to neighboring countries under direct supervision by militia leaders.

Humairi added that the group financially rewards African refugees who have carried out missions including smuggling contraband.

He further accused the militias of supplying the migrants with weapons.

Through “organized” operations, the militias are sending African migrants, including women and children, to border regions in Saadah and Hajjah, and forcing them to carry out dangerous tasks, Humairi added.

The insurgents’ practices against African refugees coincided with new accusations by the Yemeni Network for Rights and Freedoms to the Houthis of forcibly disappearing around 2,406 Yemenis of various age categories in addition to 382 African refugees in 17 provinces between January 1, 2017 and mid-2023.

Yemen is a transit point to thousands of Africans coming from the African eastern coast and who wish to move to the neighboring Gulf countries. This makes them subject to violence and exploitation by the Houthis. Most of them face all kinds of blackmail, according to rights sources and international reports.

Roughly 280,000 refugees from Africa live in Yemen. Most are from Somalia and Ethiopia, according to previous UN estimates.

Reports say thousands of African migrants in the insurgent-ruled areas are subject to systematic liquidation, especially those who refuse to get involved in the recruitment or smuggling.

In May, Houthis opened an illegal center for African migrants in the group’s stronghold in Saadah without any coordination with international organizations that defend refugee rights.

This came amid the arrival of 41,000 African refugees and migrants to Yemen in the first quarter of the current year, according to the Mixed Migration Center.

Local sources in Saadah told Asharq Al-Awsat that the militias seek to gather thousands of African refugees to force them into intensive mobilization courses and then get them involved in contraband smuggling and placing them on the battlefronts.



Amnesty Accuses Israel of 'Live-streamed Genocide' against Gaza Palestinians

TOPSHOT - Palestinians inspect the damage after an Israeli strike on the Yafa school building, a school-turned-shelter, in Gaza City on April 23, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)
TOPSHOT - Palestinians inspect the damage after an Israeli strike on the Yafa school building, a school-turned-shelter, in Gaza City on April 23, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)
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Amnesty Accuses Israel of 'Live-streamed Genocide' against Gaza Palestinians

TOPSHOT - Palestinians inspect the damage after an Israeli strike on the Yafa school building, a school-turned-shelter, in Gaza City on April 23, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)
TOPSHOT - Palestinians inspect the damage after an Israeli strike on the Yafa school building, a school-turned-shelter, in Gaza City on April 23, 2025. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)

Amnesty International on Tuesday accused Israel of committing a "live-streamed genocide" against Palestinians in Gaza by forcibly displacing most of the population and deliberately creating a humanitarian catastrophe.

In its annual report, Amnesty charged that Israel had acted with "specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, thus committing genocide".

Israel has rejected accusations of "genocide" from Amnesty, other rights groups and some states in its war in Gaza.

The conflict erupted after the Palestinian group Hamas's deadly October 7, 2023 attacks inside Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Hamas also abducted 251 people, 58 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.

Israel in response launched a relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip and a ground operation that according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory has left at least 52,243 dead.

"Since 7 October 2023, when Hamas perpetrated horrific crimes against Israeli citizens and others and captured more than 250 hostages, the world has been made audience to a live-streamed genocide," Amnesty's secretary general Agnes Callamard said in the introduction to the report.

"States watched on as if powerless, as Israel killed thousands upon thousands of Palestinians, wiping out entire multigenerational families, destroying homes, livelihoods, hospitals and schools," she added.

'Extreme levels of suffering'

Gaza's civil defense agency said early Tuesday that four people were killed and others injured in an Israeli air strike on displaced persons' tents near the Al-Iqleem area in Southern Gaza.

The agency earlier warned fuel shortages meant it had been forced to suspend eight out of 12 emergency vehicles in Southern Gaza, including ambulances.

The lack of fuel "threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens and displaced persons in shelter centers," it said in a statement.

Amnesty's report said the Israeli campaign had left most of the Palestinians of Gaza "displaced, homeless, hungry, at risk of life-threatening diseases and unable to access medical care, power or clean water".

Amnesty said that throughout 2024 it had "documented multiple war crimes by Israel, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects, and indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks".

It said Israel's actions forcibly displaced 1.9 million Palestinians, around 90 percent of Gaza's population, and "deliberately engineered an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe".

Even as protesters hit the streets in Western capitals, "the world's governments individually and multilaterally failed repeatedly to take meaningful action to end the atrocities and were slow even in calling for a ceasefire".

Meanwhile, Amnesty also sounded alarm over Israeli actions in the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank, and repeated an accusation that Israel was employing a system of "apartheid".

"Israel's system of apartheid became increasingly violent in the occupied West Bank, marked by a sharp increase in unlawful killings and state-backed attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian civilians," it said.

Heba Morayef, Amnesty director for the Middle East and North Africa region, denounced "the extreme levels of suffering that Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to endure on a daily basis over the past year" as well as "the world's complete inability or lack of political will to put a stop to it".