Rabab Al-Mudwahi was returned to prison like stolen goods returned to thieves' vaults. The head of the Information Department at the National Democratic Institute (NDI) was only granted a brief respite from the prison walls, a fleeting moment of light that allowed her to bid farewell to her late mother. Just a few hours, then the iron gate closed again, as if she had never left, as if the grief she carried was another charge deserving punishment.
The death of Rabab's mother was not just a fleeting event in the saga of pain. It was a mirror reflecting the faces of thousands of mothers and fathers who had their loved ones ripped from them, snatched from their homes, their dreams, their lives, and thrown into windowless prisons. All the loss, all the helplessness, all the lamentation condensed in that moment when Rabab was returned to her cell, as if death alone was not enough.
But there is pain that cannot be spoken, pain no language can carry. It is the agony that gnaws at the souls of mothers and fathers when their imprisoned children die behind bars—alone, without a proper farewell, without hands to wipe their foreheads one last time. In prison, no one dies alone; with them, every feature their loved ones once knew perishes as well.
It was a shock, but not a surprise. Death in Houthi prisons is not an event—it is a calendar whose pages turn in a grim, cyclical pattern. This time, it was Ahmed Ba’alawi, a humanitarian worker with the World Food Programme, a young man who had dedicated his life to serving the hungry. The Houthi group arbitrarily detained him in January 2025, holding him in a prison in Sa’ada, their stronghold in northern Yemen, until his death was announced last month. But Ahmed was not the first. Before him was Hisham Al-Hakimi, the Director of Safety and Security at Save the Children, who was dragged to the same fate. Hisham died in October 2023 while in detention. Was it torture? Medical neglect? Or both, combined in the lethal formula perfected by Houthi prisons? It makes no difference. In the end, the result is the same—names erased, bodies discarded, and families left receiving condolences instead of reunions.
In June 2024, the Houthis launched a mass arrest campaign, as if indulging in their favorite hobby—hunting down free voices, suffocating hope, and silencing breath. Among the detainees was Rabab Al-Mudwahi. There was no reason for her arrest other than the fact that she worked with civil society organizations.
Days passed. Months. And Rabab’s mother waited. But waiting in Yemen is not just the passing of time—it is slow torture. She never saw her daughter before she died, never held her hand, never heard her voice. She died with only a frozen image in her heart—of a daughter snatched into the unknown, never to return.
And the tragedy? This is not the first story of its kind.
How many fathers have died of heartbreak? How many mothers and fathers have passed away while their sons and daughters remain arbitrarily imprisoned? The more loss repeats itself, the more familiar the pain becomes, as if this country knows nothing but tragedy. But the women of Yemen do not know surrender. Mothers and wives, activists and fighters—they have not grown weary, they have not fallen silent. They take to the streets, standing with exhausted faces and hoarse voices, demanding, shouting, raising pictures of their loved ones as if lifting their very souls.
From this pain, from this unhealed wound, the Association of Abductees’ Mothers was born in 2015. It was not just a human rights organization—it was a collective cry, a living testament that the tragedy will not be forgotten, that no matter how hard they try to silence the voices, they will keep echoing until the prisons collapse.
The Association does not stop at documenting kidnappings and enforced disappearances. It does not merely count names or record events. No—it lights its torches in the darkest corners, refusing to let those who have vanished into prison walls be forgotten. It does not just scream; it builds advocacy networks with human rights groups, mobilizes efforts in diplomatic offices, knocks on the doors of tribal leaders and sheikhs, and shatters the silence in meetings with authorities and warring parties. Inside Yemen, abroad, in every place their voices can reach, there is someone demanding, someone crying out:
Where are they? Why are they still behind these walls? Who gave you the right to steal their lives?
No exhaustion, no surrender, no stopping. Because justice is not just a slogan—it is a demand engraved in the hearts of mothers, in the eyes of fathers, in the clenched fists of all those who refuse to accept injustice as fate. The Association of Abductees’ Mothers seeks to bring the perpetrators to trial, punish the kidnappers, expose the criminals, and compensate the victims. Because pain is not healed by silence, but by accountability. Because suffering will not end until the last prison door is opened, until the last disappeared person is returned, until those responsible for all this devastation are finally told: You will not escape punishment.
833 cases of abduction and detention in one year. 833 lives torn away and thrown into prison dungeons. The 2024 report by the Association of Abductees’ Mothers reads like a long lament—a chronicle of pain, disappearance, and torture, a list of names whose owners have been swallowed by high walls.
754 cases were carried out by the Houthi group, 308 of which were mass arrests. 51 cases were committed by the UAE-backed Security Belt forces. 16 cases by Yemen’s internationally recognized government. 12 cases by the Joint Forces. In the end, it makes no difference. Everyone is complicit. Everyone has a prison. Everyone is skilled in the art of enforced disappearance.
103 people simply vanished. No letters, no phone calls, no trace. Only their families know what it means to have a loved one turned into a mere memory—a name floating in the minds of mothers who wait for a return that will never come. 84 cases of disappearance at the hands of the Houthis. The remaining cases were spread across different forces that have long practiced the crime of enforced disappearance. Torture is not an exception—it is routine. It is the language of communication inside these prisons.
The Association documented 58 cases of torture: 38 by the Houthis. 9 by the Security Belt forces. 6 by the internationally recognized government. 5 by the Joint Forces. But these are not just numbers. These are bodies stacked upon bodies, screams silenced, flesh torn by merciless whips. Six detainees never made it out. Not because they were sentenced to die—but because they did. They died under torture. They died from disease and neglect.
Then came May 31, 2024, and the horror began again. Within two weeks, the Houthis stormed homes and offices—not searching, but seizing. 13 UN employees. 50 civil society workers. All were abducted. And the world remained silent.
The cells are full. Only three were released—mere crumbs thrown to make the repression seem less cruel. One UN staff member and two from NGOs. But what about the rest? No one knows anything about them. Then came January 23, 2025—another round, another wave of blind repression. Eight more UN employees vanished as if the earth had swallowed them whole. All of them were detained without charges, without trial, without lawyers, without even a single message to reassure their families.
"The challenges facing Yemen today are immense… perhaps most notably, the continuous shrinking of civic space, particularly in areas under the control of Ansar Allah," said the UN envoy to Yemen, Hans Grundberg. But words alone are not enough to describe the devastation. "The arbitrary detentions targeting UN staff, civil society, diplomats, and the private sector—along with the tragedy of our World Food Programme colleague who died in detention—highlight the growing risks and the shrinking space for those seeking to support Yemenis." As if to say: No one is outside the reach of repression. Everyone is a target. Anyone can disappear in the blink of an eye. No questions are asked. No justifications are given. They are simply taken.
And with time, names fade into oblivion, except for the mothers.
Mothers never forget.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
The death of Rabab's mother was not just a fleeting event in the saga of pain. It was a mirror reflecting the faces of thousands of mothers and fathers who had their loved ones ripped from them, snatched from their homes, their dreams, their lives, and thrown into windowless prisons. All the loss, all the helplessness, all the lamentation condensed in that moment when Rabab was returned to her cell, as if death alone was not enough.
But there is pain that cannot be spoken, pain no language can carry. It is the agony that gnaws at the souls of mothers and fathers when their imprisoned children die behind bars—alone, without a proper farewell, without hands to wipe their foreheads one last time. In prison, no one dies alone; with them, every feature their loved ones once knew perishes as well.
It was a shock, but not a surprise. Death in Houthi prisons is not an event—it is a calendar whose pages turn in a grim, cyclical pattern. This time, it was Ahmed Ba’alawi, a humanitarian worker with the World Food Programme, a young man who had dedicated his life to serving the hungry. The Houthi group arbitrarily detained him in January 2025, holding him in a prison in Sa’ada, their stronghold in northern Yemen, until his death was announced last month. But Ahmed was not the first. Before him was Hisham Al-Hakimi, the Director of Safety and Security at Save the Children, who was dragged to the same fate. Hisham died in October 2023 while in detention. Was it torture? Medical neglect? Or both, combined in the lethal formula perfected by Houthi prisons? It makes no difference. In the end, the result is the same—names erased, bodies discarded, and families left receiving condolences instead of reunions.
In June 2024, the Houthis launched a mass arrest campaign, as if indulging in their favorite hobby—hunting down free voices, suffocating hope, and silencing breath. Among the detainees was Rabab Al-Mudwahi. There was no reason for her arrest other than the fact that she worked with civil society organizations.
Days passed. Months. And Rabab’s mother waited. But waiting in Yemen is not just the passing of time—it is slow torture. She never saw her daughter before she died, never held her hand, never heard her voice. She died with only a frozen image in her heart—of a daughter snatched into the unknown, never to return.
And the tragedy? This is not the first story of its kind.
How many fathers have died of heartbreak? How many mothers and fathers have passed away while their sons and daughters remain arbitrarily imprisoned? The more loss repeats itself, the more familiar the pain becomes, as if this country knows nothing but tragedy. But the women of Yemen do not know surrender. Mothers and wives, activists and fighters—they have not grown weary, they have not fallen silent. They take to the streets, standing with exhausted faces and hoarse voices, demanding, shouting, raising pictures of their loved ones as if lifting their very souls.
From this pain, from this unhealed wound, the Association of Abductees’ Mothers was born in 2015. It was not just a human rights organization—it was a collective cry, a living testament that the tragedy will not be forgotten, that no matter how hard they try to silence the voices, they will keep echoing until the prisons collapse.
The Association does not stop at documenting kidnappings and enforced disappearances. It does not merely count names or record events. No—it lights its torches in the darkest corners, refusing to let those who have vanished into prison walls be forgotten. It does not just scream; it builds advocacy networks with human rights groups, mobilizes efforts in diplomatic offices, knocks on the doors of tribal leaders and sheikhs, and shatters the silence in meetings with authorities and warring parties. Inside Yemen, abroad, in every place their voices can reach, there is someone demanding, someone crying out:
Where are they? Why are they still behind these walls? Who gave you the right to steal their lives?
No exhaustion, no surrender, no stopping. Because justice is not just a slogan—it is a demand engraved in the hearts of mothers, in the eyes of fathers, in the clenched fists of all those who refuse to accept injustice as fate. The Association of Abductees’ Mothers seeks to bring the perpetrators to trial, punish the kidnappers, expose the criminals, and compensate the victims. Because pain is not healed by silence, but by accountability. Because suffering will not end until the last prison door is opened, until the last disappeared person is returned, until those responsible for all this devastation are finally told: You will not escape punishment.
833 cases of abduction and detention in one year. 833 lives torn away and thrown into prison dungeons. The 2024 report by the Association of Abductees’ Mothers reads like a long lament—a chronicle of pain, disappearance, and torture, a list of names whose owners have been swallowed by high walls.
754 cases were carried out by the Houthi group, 308 of which were mass arrests. 51 cases were committed by the UAE-backed Security Belt forces. 16 cases by Yemen’s internationally recognized government. 12 cases by the Joint Forces. In the end, it makes no difference. Everyone is complicit. Everyone has a prison. Everyone is skilled in the art of enforced disappearance.
103 people simply vanished. No letters, no phone calls, no trace. Only their families know what it means to have a loved one turned into a mere memory—a name floating in the minds of mothers who wait for a return that will never come. 84 cases of disappearance at the hands of the Houthis. The remaining cases were spread across different forces that have long practiced the crime of enforced disappearance. Torture is not an exception—it is routine. It is the language of communication inside these prisons.
The Association documented 58 cases of torture: 38 by the Houthis. 9 by the Security Belt forces. 6 by the internationally recognized government. 5 by the Joint Forces. But these are not just numbers. These are bodies stacked upon bodies, screams silenced, flesh torn by merciless whips. Six detainees never made it out. Not because they were sentenced to die—but because they did. They died under torture. They died from disease and neglect.
Then came May 31, 2024, and the horror began again. Within two weeks, the Houthis stormed homes and offices—not searching, but seizing. 13 UN employees. 50 civil society workers. All were abducted. And the world remained silent.
The cells are full. Only three were released—mere crumbs thrown to make the repression seem less cruel. One UN staff member and two from NGOs. But what about the rest? No one knows anything about them. Then came January 23, 2025—another round, another wave of blind repression. Eight more UN employees vanished as if the earth had swallowed them whole. All of them were detained without charges, without trial, without lawyers, without even a single message to reassure their families.
"The challenges facing Yemen today are immense… perhaps most notably, the continuous shrinking of civic space, particularly in areas under the control of Ansar Allah," said the UN envoy to Yemen, Hans Grundberg. But words alone are not enough to describe the devastation. "The arbitrary detentions targeting UN staff, civil society, diplomats, and the private sector—along with the tragedy of our World Food Programme colleague who died in detention—highlight the growing risks and the shrinking space for those seeking to support Yemenis." As if to say: No one is outside the reach of repression. Everyone is a target. Anyone can disappear in the blink of an eye. No questions are asked. No justifications are given. They are simply taken.
And with time, names fade into oblivion, except for the mothers.
Mothers never forget.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
*This article was first written for and published in Arabic on the Daraj website.
