Militia hysteria

The shoulder that the villagers used to see their computer bag hanging on, now holds the Kalashnikov. My neighbor was surprised to see the rifle slung over my shoulder in 2019. In fact, I shifted the laptop to the other shoulder to accompany me wherever I went in the afternoon.

Usually, I go out in the afternoon to a place overlooking the village to complete my day and write. This is how I used to spend my time in the village after the war broke out, before I was forced to acquire a new habit: carrying a rifle day and night.

After the computer bag was moved to the other shoulder and the gun was in its place, people would see nothing but the gun. Our neighbor asked me what the secret was. I was on edge after returning from the market and buying a magazine and thirty bullets. I explained to him: “At night I meet rabbits that make me want to hunt.” This excuse didn’t work. “Everyone loves you, no need for a gun. You won’t kill anyone,” our neighbor said, revealing my readiness. He confirmed that he believed that. “Unless someone comes to kidnap me,” I assured him. “I won’t give myself up to anyone.”

The state of alert that I experienced in those days came after one of the social figures in the region told me that he heard the Houthis of the country repeating my name in a session with a Houthi leader, who warned me: “We can do something if they kidnap a major fighter against them, but you can’t.”

Why?

“You are a writer. You have Facebook. We will not be able to deceive them about your book. There are many who are beautiful, and they are poor without being beautiful.”

Since that day, the gun has been stuck to my shoulder, so that I don't live in the darkness of the militia.

What I was experiencing was not an obsession created by anxiety. During the period when the Houthis spread and took control of Sana’a in late 2014, Fares Abu Bar’ah published the blacklist issued by the armed group’s kitchens against journalists. I saw my name on the list.

Abu Baraa was one of the first active Yemenis I knew on Facebook. At that time, one could appear thoughtful, he had to attract the audience with his finger stuck close to his ear and his eyes lost in the depths of the picture. Fares Abu Baraa had three pages, the journalist Fares Abu Baraa page one.. the journalist Fares Abu Baraa page two, the journalist Fares Abu Baraa page three.

At that time in 2010, when we started to infiltrate Facebook, people were greedy and wanted to get the largest number of virtual friends, so they would not stop competing by sending requests. There is no doubt that the thinker's finger was scratched while he was doing that, and how much I used to reproach myself for not knowing Abu Baraa and not being ignorant of his production, while he had all those pages and all those friends. I would also be happy if I got to know him and his works.

Between 2011 and 2013, I was a correspondent for some local newspapers, and I worked for Al-Ahali newspaper. The newspaper devoted space to discussing the Houthis and criticizing them, the violations, the crimes. We opened the file on the mines planted by the militia in Hajjah, the tragedy of Dammaj, and most importantly, we discussed the Houthi beliefs and ideas in depth. The specialist Zayed Jaber was the main writer who struck the Houthis to the core. We were the first to reveal the intellectual document, Al-Istifā’, and Al-Khams.

At that time, I met the journalist Fares Abu Baraa. He was very simple and skeletal, not because he was related to the journalist Heikal, but rather to the skeleton. I knew that he was sitting in the Houthis’ steadfastness tent. Since then, whenever someone from the Houthis’ tent saw me and knew that I worked for Al-Ahali newspaper, he would interrupt me on my way to college lectures, to give me a long lecture that usually ended in a quarrel between two groups of passersby.

I was on the Ahali Net website with my colleague Mohammed Al-Jaradi, publishing material. I received threatening messages from unknown numbers and pages with real names on Facebook. I put them out by ignoring them and not responding. During that period, I would sometimes come across Fares Abu Baraa, sometimes in the dilapidated building of the College of Media, before he suddenly jumped from the college’s trolley to the Republican Palace after the Houthis stormed Sana’a. Abu Baraa used to receive delegations at the palace and discuss the country’s pending issues with them. I saw my name and the name of my colleague Mohammed Al-Jaradi on the blacklist of Yemeni journalists according to Abu Baraa’s post. The Houthi pages circulated the list. I did not care, but I felt biased against Fares: Did he do us a favor so that the Houthis would later appoint him as deputy governor of Hajjah?

I don't know.. In any case, after the Houthis' interest in him ends, they will throw him out like a bone, and they did, so he will return as a critic from where he came from: Facebook, on one page.

These accumulations are perhaps what made me mobilized in 2019, after a social figure told me that he heard the country’s Houthis repeating my name, and confirming to me that no one would be able to mediate to get me out of the Houthis’ custody: “You have Facebook with you...”

After I felt tired of carrying the gun during the day in front of people, and I started telling myself that the Houthis will not come and I should give it up, a Houthi came to me and reproached me because I wrote a poem about them. I was surprised, I do not write poetry, I write articles and posts directly from the source. The Houthi would disappear for a while, I discovered that they had put him in Al-Saleh prison and he came out with his nails removed and his body shocked because he disobeyed the order of a Houthi leader who fled from the front, so he fled with him. In the next battle, he refused to advance except with the leader Abu Nasr, and as a result Abu Nasr killed him.

The militia practices its crimes in underground cellars as it does above ground, even with the Yemenis who have joined Houthis and aligned themselves with them. It is better to confront in the open air than to suffocate in the cellars. I have asthma. At that time, I was breathing by writing, and planning the price that the writer would have to pay. I bought another magazine of bullets too, but I did not buy the bullets until I left.

*

In the Houthi environment, the obsession with writing and its price conflict in the writer’s mind. Not the price he will receive in exchange for writing, but the price he will pay with his life, or rather, the Houthis will forcibly take from his life and health.

The writer who publishes his critical and scandalous writings about the Houthis expects anything. Social media users expect the same. Yemenis believe that the group deals with them as an opposing party, and the Houthis believe that there are differences between them and the Yemenis, to the point that they do not trust the Yemenis who have been Houthid, using them to achieve interests until the time comes to dispense with them.

The Houthis assert that they have reached the power that enables them to challenge the world powers. They insist on this equation: Houthi hyperpower that has reached its peak versus impotence and exhaustion that has also reached its peak for the Yemenis.

But the result reveals a flaw in the equation, as the Houthis, who are at the peak of power as they claim, are living in a state of hysteria that reached its peak during the past days of the glorious month of September. During the past days, the kidnapping campaigns launched by the Houthis against Yemenis have not stopped, in the areas they control, Sana’a, Ibb, Taiz, Amran, and others.

The campaigns are not limited to writers, they even target women, those who celebrated September 26 last year, and those who intended to celebrate this year, in the village or city, raiding and storming the homes of those who prepared damaged car tires and those who bought flags, the old and the young, the owners of bicycles and cars, lawyers and teachers, even the ghoul who helped them enter his area, and celebrated with them the catastrophe of September 21 and the birth, and began to spread joy on September 26, expressed his fear of the Houthi crews that took dozens, and every time a crew passed by he thought that his turn had come.

The majority of the Yemeni kidnapped people did not attack or criticize Al Houthi. All they did was express their joy on September 26, while they live the rest of the year in misery.

The kidnapping of my friend and writer Mohammed Dabwan Al-Mayahy was not the only evidence of the militia’s growing madness this week. The Houthis have kidnapped and continue to kidnap hundreds of Yemeni men and women, under the “intention of celebrating September 26,” and some of these Yemenis revealed their “dangerous” intentions by writing on Facebook and putting a September holiday frame on their photos as well.

It is worthy of the Yemenis, including the Houthis, to realize that the confrontation is between two parties: the Yemenis and the Houthis.