Mortars, Drones and Displacement: Yemen's Civil War Closes In on Taiz

The drone came first, as it usually does. The soldier travelling with us in south-western Yemen said as much, and then the buzzing overhead grew louder. We took cover beneath the bushes, climbed back into the vehicle and drove. Within ten minutes the thuds began, one after another, though it was impossible to tell where the strikes landed.

It is hard to tell where the front line begins in the mountains south-west of Taiz. Saudi-backed pro-government forces are battling to push back Houthi fighters, who swept down the Red Sea coast earlier this month, seizing a key shipping chokepoint and escalating Yemen's civil war. We travelled with government forces from Taiz through checkpoint after checkpoint, to the line where their control ends and no man's land begins, to see the fighting up close.

Homes are scattered across the slopes, but many stand abandoned after families fled. The quiet is eerie. No cars or motorbikes whizz through as they do in the city. All you can hear is the bleating of livestock and the sound of incoming and outgoing fire.

Two mortars landed on my property, said Ali, sitting outside his home with a herd of goats about a kilometre from the front line. He has remained under mortar fire to look after his animals, having sent his children to a displacement camp because they could no longer cope with the shelling and gunfire. He stayed behind with his wife and sisters. I am terrified, he said, but I have no choice. We will all go hungry without our animals and die anyway. He gave only his first name, fearful of what may follow if the Houthis take the area in the days ahead. Contacts from the Houthi side have told us they are consolidating troops and preparing a major offensive. When we asked government forces about this, they said they were aware and preparing too.

At the closest checkpoint to the front line, we met fighters who had just returned from positions high on the mountain, a few hundred metres from advancing Houthis. One said the bodies of 18 government soldiers lay in an area his unit could fire across but not reach. We shoot over them, but we can't pull them out, he said.

Fighting around Taiz has intensified since the Houthis seized the strategic Red Sea port of Mokha, 85km to the west, on 10 September, after a ceasefire that had largely held for four years unravelled. The group took control of a swathe of territory overlooking the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the crucial shipping corridor linking Europe and Asia. Oil prices rose as fears grew of further disruption to supplies from the region.

Taiz is Yemen's third biggest city and its cultural capital, home to close to a million people. It sits at a vital intersection between Houthi-controlled areas in the north and government-held ones in the south, hemmed in by front lines on several sides. Government forces hold the centre, while Houthi positions lie to its north and east. The fiercest recent fighting has been on the western approaches, where the two sides contest high ground overlooking the city's route south. If the Houthis secure these areas, government forces could find it far harder to retake Mokha.

We travelled to Taiz from Aden in the south, where Yemen's internationally recognised Presidential Leadership Council and government are based. About 30 checkpoints along the route marked stretches of road controlled by different commanders, a clear sign of the fractured make-up of the forces fighting on the government side. As we neared the city, ambulances began to pass us. We counted at least five within half an hour, heading for Taiz's main hospital. We were driving into a city at the heart of a brutal battle.

We arrived after dark. The shops were lit, the restaurants packed, children playing in the streets. Every so often, other sounds broke through: the thud of shelling and the crack of gunfire from the mountains around the city.

Taiz has been a major battleground in Yemen's devastating civil war. After ousting the government from Sanaa in 2015, the Houthis attempted to seize Taiz as well but were driven out of most of the city by local militiamen. Now, in their latest offensive, they are making extensive use of drones alongside other weapons. Their main outside supplier is Iran, which has provided weapons, funding and military advice, according to Saudi Arabia, Western countries and UN experts. Iran has previously denied supplying weapons to the Houthis and says it supports them only politically.

There have been persistent reports over many years of the Houthis recruiting child soldiers, and a government soldier told us he had faced them on the front line. It's difficult to look at a Yemeni child and shoot at him, he said. But then they are pointing the gun at you and you have to defend yourself. The Houthis signed an action plan with the UN in 2022 pledging to end the practice. The BBC has also spoken to teenagers serving with government forces.

A coalition led by Saudi Arabia is backing the Yemeni government and providing it with weapons. The Saudi military has carried out hundreds of air strikes on Houthi positions on the Red Sea coast, while the Houthis have launched drones and missiles at cities and infrastructure in south-western Saudi Arabia.

In the evening, at al-Thawra hospital in Taiz, casualties from the front lines were brought into an intensive care unit where every bed we saw was occupied. Some patients were fighters, others civilians. Twelve-year-old Ghana Nabeel had been herding goats when shrapnel struck her head. Her family said an incoming Houthi mortar had landed nearby. She lay unconscious, her head wrapped in bandages, her face swollen and bruised. Her family waited at her bedside to learn what life might be like if she wakes. A doctor told me the injury had damaged her brain. She will never be the same again, he said.

About 20km south of Taiz, at the al-Monig displacement camp, families who had fled Mokha and villages hit by fighting were arriving among hundreds of tents. We were told 200 families had arrived in the previous ten days. Maryam Saleh, not her real name, had come a week earlier from Mokha with her husband and five children, the youngest aged seven. She sat weaving a hat to sell so she could buy food for the day. We walked barefoot and we didn't carry anything with us, just our children, she told me. Her nephew was killed by shrapnel from a mortar as they fled, she said. He had been walking behind her. She described clashes and sniping both ahead of and behind the family, and said she then saw armed men on the mountain. We thought we were finished, she said. The children were screaming and crying, but the family kept walking.

Fatma Mohammed Saleh was lying on an empty rice sack outside another family's tent. She has a disability and cannot walk, and told me she had nowhere of her own to sleep. I have nothing, she said. No shelter, no mattress, no family. Nothing. She had been with her two sons and their children when the fighting reached their village, but she was slowing them down, so she told them to take the children and run. She spent the next two days crawling on her hands and knees. I was crawling and the bullets are coming from here and the shells are there, she said. And the bullets are here, and the shells are here. And above me it was like thunder. I was praying to God. A man on a motorbike saw her and drove her to the camp. She has not seen her family since.

On 22 September, the UN refugee agency said more than 130,000 people had been displaced across Yemen so far this month, on top of 5.2 million already displaced by the civil war. It warned that another 100,000 could, like Fatma, be forced from their homes over the next three months.