Four years of war has not brought Saudi Arabia any closer to victory, but all over Yemen ordinary people are suffering. Photography by Achilleas Zavallis. Mon 30 Sep It has started to rain and the angry sky is threatening thunder, but a lone figure is picking his way through the rubble of Dhamar detention centre in Houthi-controlled northern Yemen. His name is Mustafa al-Adel. Although his brother Ahmed, a guard, died here when the site was recently hit by a ferocious airstrike , he is still employed to watch over the ruins.
At night he sleeps in the least damaged building. It has washed away the blood. Suffering is palpable everywhere. The overnight attack on Dhamar on 1 September was the deadliest so far this year by the Saudi-led coalition of 20 Arab nations fighting to restore the deposed president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, according to the Yemen Data Project, a database tracking the war.
Even by the standards of a conflict defined by indiscriminate bombing of civilians at markets, weddings and hospitals, the violence was shocking. At least people died in what eyewitnesses said were seven strikes that pulverised the area. It took five days to remove all the bodies impaled on metalwork ripped from the walls in the blasts.
It was also an attack that targeted their own: about half of the prisoners were captured Hadi soldiers and half were civilians arrested by the Houthis, said a survivor, Ali Ahmed al-Abasi, 39, from his hospital bed. Pictures of the burnt and bloody faces of the dead are now on the wall near the entrance for families to come and identify.
In some cases there are no faces left: just hands. The coalition denied it had struck a detention centre, saying it had hit a military site used by the Houthis for restoring drones and missiles. Strikes such as those on Dhamar that could constitute war crimes hit northern Yemen on an alarmingly regular basis. Barely a street in the town of the same name has been left untouched: the post office, central market and countless civilian homes are gone. Death comes from above at any time.
