Targeting Sana'a University: A systematic Houthi war on education in Yemen

Following its coup and occupation of the capital, Sana'a, in late 2014, the Iranian-backed terrorist Houthi militias focused on educational institutions and placed them on the list of systematic and gradual targeting and destruction. At the forefront of these institutions is Sana'a University, which is the largest and oldest in Yemen.

Since they are remnants of the Imamate, the Houthi militias deal with educational institutions as a source of concern that poses a threat to their project. They believe that their survival and the continuation of their authority for a longer period cannot be achieved with the presence of societal awareness, and they cannot derive their strength and existence except by targeting the educational process.

Over the past 10 years, the Iranian-backed Houthi terrorist militia has waged a fierce, multi-faceted war against Sana’a University, starting with starving academics and employees, depriving them of their salaries and abusing them, through dismissing and replacing them with loyalists, changing curricula, and forcibly recruiting students and professors, all the way to seizing vast areas of land within the university campus.

Sana'a University is the first Yemeni university, established in 1970 at the expense of the State of Kuwait. It has a large area allocated for future expansion and development and currently includes 21 colleges. Before the militia coup, it included 124 specializations and scientific departments, and no less than eight thousand male and female students studied there. Tens of thousands graduated from all specializations and it was ranked the first university in Yemen.

seizure and tampering

A few days ago, a document was leaked that included a directive from the head of the so-called Houthi Political Council, Mahdi Al-Mashat, to the acting head of the General Authority for Land, Survey and Urban Planning affiliated with the militia to hand over 10,000 bricks west of the Faculty of Medicine at Sana'a University to an unknown person named "Abdo Ali Mahdi" to invest in establishing a (medical city). The directive included completing the procedures for officially owning it.

This incident, which angered the Yemenis, was not the first of its kind. Al-Mashat had previously ordered the delivery of thousands of real estate units and several buildings from Sana’a University to the Houthi Endowments Authority, under the cover of fictitious service projects, but it comes within the framework of its plan aimed at destroying this great educational edifice.

In late 2021, academics and employees at Sana'a University raised an issue of prominent Houthi leaders seizing and robbing lands belonging to Sana'a University and seizing large areas near the university's College of Medicine and Health Sciences and turning them into their private property, with the complicity and silence of the university leadership loyal to the militia.

In the same context, local residents told "Yemeni Youth Net" that the Houthi militia recently built a huge commercial center on the wall of Sana'a University, on the side of the Change Square platform. They explained that work on the center, which was built with four floors, proceeded at a high pace and took only a few months to complete. It was equipped as a commercial market, believing that the center is affiliated with a Houthi leader.

Systematic targeting of education

The Undersecretary of the Yemeni Ministry of Information, Fayyadh Al-Numan, confirms that the practices of the Houthi militias against Sana'a University, its cadres and its properties are not a recent development. Since the first days of their coup against state institutions, they have rushed to systematically target Sana'a University according to a racist sectarian strategy to eliminate the gains of the Yemeni people and the educational process in particular.

Al-Naaman told "Yemeni Youth Net" that "the militia's practices against the educational process, the latest of which was the sale of lands belonging to Sana'a University to people belonging to the group, is evidence of the approach of this group that seeks to return Yemen to what it was six decades before the establishment of the republic against the defunct Imamate era, which makes it easier for it to promote its sectarian and racist ideas, to make society ignorant, and to eliminate the aspirations of Yemenis and their opposition to the Houthi ideas imported from Tehran and Qom."

He pointed out that the Houthi militia had previously expelled many academics and their families from university housing, and replaced them with its own elements, arbitrarily, without taking into account the humanitarian conditions imposed by the absurd war it waged against Yemen and the Yemenis.

He continued: "This militia is trying to destroy what remains of education by all means, as it has cut the salaries of academics, which has increased their suffering and made it difficult for them to secure their basic needs, in addition to granting university degrees to individuals who believe in its ideology but did not enroll in university and do not hold high school qualifications, exploiting its control over university outputs. All of this goes in a systematic targeting of the educational process."