Citing lack of security, some women choose to fight
In war-torn Yemen women are increasingly turning to the Kalashnikov. Some do it out of revenge and some out of a desire to protect their community. For others the decision to reach for the gun is a desperate act taken when there seems no other option to turn to.
“Never did I think that one day I would be fighting or picking up a weapon to kill someone, but here I am wounded and wanted, a killer in defense of myself and my family,” Salwa Ali Al-Mash, from Al-Jawf province, told The Media Line. During a clash with Houthi fighters, two men were killed and another two injured when Salwa used a weapon to protect her home.
“I would do it again if I had to, for my family and my home,” Salwa said. Single, originally from Yemen’s capital Sana’a, Salwa lived with her mother and five relatives in Al-Hazem in the north of the country.
Salwa says she is not sure if she was wounded by one of the man she shot, or by someone else. She had previously been trained with a weapon “for self-defense” but had hoped to avoid involvement in the war which has fractured Yemen. However, in May of this year, when Houthi fighters stormed Al-Hazem, Salwa decided that she needed to bear arms. “I made my weapon my best friend,” she explained.
Abdulhamid Aamer, Salwa’s uncle, is a local leader of the Al-Islah Party, a Yemeni Muslim-Brotherhood inspired group with ties to Saudi Arabia, a natural enemy of the Houthi. So it was not unexpected that when a force of 100 fighters arrived in Salwa’s neighborhood, just over a month ago, some of them approached Aamer’s home. Looting the houses of opponents and dissenters had become a common tactic for the Houthi in Al-Hazem, the injured woman said. Salwa, her mother and sisters were alone in one the buildings of her uncle’s compound.
The story of what happened next was recounted to The Media Line by both Salwa and separately by a local journalist Faisal Al-Aswad.
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Realizing that nobody in the neighborhood would offer the Houthis any resistance, Salwa picked up her rifle and stepped out in front of her home to speak with the group of Houthi fighters who had approached, Al-Aswad recounted. At first the men simply ignored Salwa, but then the confrontation escalated as her mother struck one of the fighters with a wooden stick. The Houthi responded by firing on the women, miraculously injuring none of them. In the heat of the moment, Salwa unslung her Kalashnikov and opened fire at close range, fatally wounding two men and injuring a further two. In the return fire Salwa was struck in both thighs by bullets.
A local man, himself injured in the crossfire, interceded and persuaded the Houthi to leave the building, as there were no men inside – which, dragging away their wounded, they promptly did.
But Salwa knew any reprieve would be short lived. Unable to get medical treatment in the hospital at Al-Hazem, where priority was given to Houthi fighters, Salwa and her family fled the city and found aid in Sana’a, the journalist Al-Aswad concluded.
“I will pick up a weapon (again) and fight and maybe get killed if there is a need for that,” Salwa said from her hospital bed. Following the incident she has become one of the most wanted women in Yemen. The home she had lived in, and which she was shot twice to protect, was subsequently demolished by the Houthi along with 24 other homes.
Salwa’s remarkable story is not the only tale of women bearing arms to come out of Yemen in recent months. For a deeply conservative country, where only recently controversy was triggered by women riding on bicycles in response to a shortage of fuel, it might seem unlikely that women would be empowered to bear arms. But the necessity of the war has led to some women doing just that.
From information The Media Line has been able to collect it appears that there are at least 20 women actively involved in fighting against the Houthi. Additionally more women are involved in patrols and the manning of checkpoints in various cities. This is not counting the many women who have joined in the war effort as cooks, caregivers to the injured and by simply donating money or their savings of gold.
A Houthi source said that women played an active support role but were not involved in combat operations for the group.
Many of the women carrying arms are primarily concerned with maintaining some semblance of order and peace in the streets around their homes. Um Al-Hasem, an alias which means “Mother of Decisiveness,” is one such woman who spends her time helping to secure the city of Aden. She is one of several women in the city who have taken on the role of checkpoint guard specifically to search female passengers in cars – a direct response to the Houthi attempting to smuggle fighters into the city dressed as women.
Um Al-Hasem, 40, now spends her days roaming the streets of Aden’s Sheikh Uthman neighborhood, a rifle slung over her shoulder, inspecting vehicles and their passengers with her piercing eyes. Um Al-Hasem told The Media Line that she is working as part of the Southern Resistance, in order to keep the Houthi from entering the city.
“I started inspecting cars in February when we heard that the Houthis were infiltrating Aden dressed as women. Over ten women and I cooperated with the Southern Resistance to inspect cars at the entrances of Aden and in the middle of the cities inside the province”, Al-Hasem said. She admitted that it was difficult to get the balance right in her new role between sufficiently searching passing vehicles and maintaining the protection of her and her fellow fighters. As a result Al-Hasem has been shot at more than ten times and been involved in several firefights.
Despite this not everybody takes the women’s contributions seriously. Um Al-Hasem points to the ten Houthi fighters in women’s garb that she unmasked and arrested earlier in the year as they attempted to infiltrate the city. The Southern Resistance appeared to be more than happy with the help of Al-Hasem, with one fighter, Majed Awain, saying that both her work on the checkpoints and Al-Hasem’s attempts to recruit other women fighters were respected.
Most of the men in Yemen who are opposed to the Houthi seem happy to have additional fighters to their cause in the form of these women fighters. Although deeply conservative it has been the norm for women to learn to use a weapon, a testament to the proclivity of gun culture in the country.
“There are dozens of women throughout the streets of Aden inspecting (vehicles) with the full knowledge of the difficulties and dangers that may face them,” Majed Al-Shuaibi, a journalist linked to the Southern Resistance, told The Media Line. Al-Shuaibi confirmed that the Mother of Decisiveness was probably the most famous female fighter in Yemen at the moment but that there was a growing number of tales about other fighters too.
One such story, from Amran province, described an act of revenge launched by a Yemeni woman whose husband and son had both died in battles against the Houthi. In a firefight said to have dragged out over ten straight hours the women killed four Houthi fighters before being overwhelmed and killed herself.