Yemen’s civil war, which began in 2014, has resulted in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. The United Nations estimates that 60% of the 377,000 deaths between 2015 and 2022 were attributed to food insecurity and limited access to health services, and two-thirds of the population (21.6 million people) are in desperate need of humanitarian aid. Though a nominal ceasefire has held since 2022, tensions persist, and civilians continue to face the brunt of the conflict.

Niku Jafarnia is a researcher at Human Rights Watch who focuses on human rights in Bahrain and Yemen. She has produced extensive work on the topic of water weaponization in the Yemeni civil war, most notably a December 2023 report entitled Death is More Merciful Than this Life, which highlighted the humanitarian impact of this tactic in the conflict. We spoke with Niku about the global challenge of water’s weaponization in war to better understand what this looks like in the context of Yemen. The following is a condensed transcript from that interview.

Your report analyzed the role that water weaponization plays in Yemen’s ongoing conflict, and particularly the toll it is taking on civilians. How is water being used in the war, and who are the main actors?

NJ: Yemen is a very water poor country, and it’s also a highly agricultural country. The majority of the population is focused on agriculture and maintains a very rural way of life—or at least they did prior to both the conflict and the resulting internal displacement. Any attacks on water, and any ways of blocking people from being able to access it, is a very big deal. This is especially true considering there is very limited access to water to begin with—and people need not only drinking water, but also water for agricultural purposes.

What I focus on in this specific report are the ways in which the different warring parties (and, in particular, the Houthis) have weaponized water in Taizz—which is Yemen’s third largest city, and has been under Houthi siege since 2016.

Each warring party in Taizz has played a role in the water crisis. For some time, government-backed forces took control of certain water infrastructure in the city center. That was when the Houthis decided to shut off the valves supplying water to the city from the parts of the city under their control. Government forces had taken over this water infrastructure and were selling water at a price to support their own forces, because they weren’t getting paid a salary. It ultimately made water infrastructure into a military target.

Water is a massive issue in the city because of the five main reservoirs in Taizz, two are on the conflict’s frontlines, and two are in Houthi-controlled territory. The Houthis have shut off the valves that run from the two reservoirs in their territory, while the two that are on the frontline are inaccessible and therefore useless.

Another thing that the organizations like Mwatana for Human Rights have documented are attacks by the Saudi-led coalition on water infrastructure. This includes water pumps on civilian agricultural land. We also have documented with Mwatana that the Saudi-led coalition had specifically targeted wells.

When I worked with Mwatana, we put together a report that addressed the use of starvation as a method of warfare. It talks about the ways in which agriculture was destroyed in certain areas because water pumps were targeted and completely taken out, so people couldn’t use water there. They couldn’t replace the pumps because they’re quite expensive, especially with a blockade, and they couldn’t water their crops. Therefore, they lost their agricultural land.

And, finally, the Houthis have also placed landmines around water infrastructure. There are some limited cases of landmines actually being found within wells. In other instances, landmines had been placed in and around wells, and also other water sources.

There are a lot of challenges when it comes to data collection, but we’ve heard many testimonies from people stating that this is the case. When you ask the Yemen Mine Action Center, they just broadly say: there are landmines everywhere, including around water infrastructure.    

In 2017, a cholera outbreak in Taizz killed 2,000 civilians due to a lack of sufficient and safe drinking water. Water weaponization and existing scarcity were to blame. What is the long-term public health impact of the weaponization of water?

NJ: One thing that I’ve learned from doing water work and climate work and starvation work in Yemen over the last few years has been that it’s really, really challenging to demonstrate real impacts that this has on people. It’s hard to track the deaths that come out of the weaponization of water, the weaponization of food, and starvation as a method of warfare, because they often end up emerging in conjunction with people’s already existing health problems. People in Yemen generally face a lack of adequate access to water and adequate food. When warring parties weaponize those two things, it obviously exacerbates much of what people are already facing.

But this is very challenging to demonstrate. The cholera outbreak itself is a culmination of factors such as a lack of water, but it also occurred in part because of the destruction of sanitation and other infrastructure. Outside of that, there’s a lot I’ve heard from activists about the incidence of various health problems being much higher in Taizz than it is in other parts of the country. I’ve also heard this from journalists who visited hospitals there, but there are no clear data and no statistics to really get at that.

What’s important also is there is very little clear data coming out of Yemen at all. We don’t even have accurate statistics for the population of Taizz at the moment. When you don’t have that, it’s hard to be able to really know the health data. But I’m sure that cholera outbreak was also much larger than what was reported.

The impacts of these are so severe and so large and massive, but really hard to actually demonstrate to a public audience.

I bring up the fact that I’m working on the same issues in Gaza right now to say: we all know how extreme the situation there is in terms of cutting off and blocking people’s general access to water. And speaking to doctors and public health officials, they’ve also really highlighted how challenging it is for them because often it comes out that it’s often elderly people or children who have other forms of health problems. They’re the first ones to die from something like this. The reason for death might be conflated with something else, versus stating it’s a lack of clean potable water.

You have researched the warring parties’ treatment of women in Yemen. What has been the impact of water weaponization in Taizz on women and children?

NJ: Water has absolutely had an impact on women in a much more acute way in Yemen. It’s an area where the gender discrepancy is obvious, particularly among younger girls.

One large impact is that girls have had to drop out of school to go and get water. We published a short piece in November on a lack of water and electricity in Aden, where there’s evidence that girls have dropped out of school. Aden is the most well off and stable part of the country, yet you still see girls who don’t have an education because they must spend their entire day walking hours to carry back water that is far too heavy for their bodies.

It’s a treacherous journey. Just by virtue of walking long distances in rural areas, there’s a higher likelihood that you might run into a landmine. There’s also obviously potential for encountering sexual and gender-based violence. Activists have told us that this wasn’t as large of an issue in the past, but has become more widespread recently.

Globally, women are usually in charge of the household, and are the caretakers, and so they will be the last ones to drink and eat when there’s a shortage of something. So I would imagine across the board, it’s hard to track these sorts of impacts. But it’s going to have an impact on women’s health as well, based on the fact that they’ll probably be the last ones to take water for themselves.

While both government and non-government forces are responsible for water weaponization, let’s focus in on the Houthis—who have blocked and restricted water access. How can the international community respond to nonstate actors’ weaponization of water?

NJ: How to influence non-state actors in general (or even state actors) is quite challenging. I think one of the main positive developments on this front in Taizz has come from local negotiators. All of the positive change you’re seeing at the moment—getting any movement and opening up the negotiations—is coming from them. There is a long history of advocacy in Taizz, and with the current negotiations there, women have been leading the way.

International organizations are really paying attention to that—and they should be paying attention to that. It’s been a constant dialogue with these negotiators to think through what messaging with these governments would be helpful right now. It was a question of how we [HRW] can have connections with these different governments as a large international organization. Are there things that international organizations can be doing that might support on the ground efforts and ways that they can place pressure?

I do think it’s quite difficult to influence actors at any given moment. But it really has to come from the people. When they don’t feel like they’re getting support from the people, they feel that their power and hold over an area is at risk. I think that situation often is helpful to the population, versus things like sanctions, which end up often hurting the population in a much more significant way.

Yemen gets a fair amount of attention. But do you think that health and water insecurity also get enough attention as an issue?

NJ: Honestly, no. I never consider myself to be an environment or water person. But my work has just ended up revolving around it for some time now, because it’s just a massive issue—and it is so critical.

We all know climate change has become this ever-looming thing. No matter what other work we’re doing, it is critical that everything ends up intersecting with climate and water and environment at the end of the day. None of the other issues can be addressed if we’re not addressing these water issues. So, in that sense, there has been more effort and focus placed on Yemen’s water crisis.

Yet a lot of things are placed on hold because there’s a conflict. Or they are placed on hold until there will be peace negotiations. So it’s always in the background, as opposed to people considering that there will continue to be conflict unless this is addressed head on—and immediately. Because it’s incredibly urgent. It’s been urgent since they started tracking the amount of water that the country had in the 1960s. And it’s just not being prioritized in the way that it needs to be, even if people feel that they’re putting more resources into it now than they did previously.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Once you really start to understand the dynamics involved, it can’t exist within a tiny silo of our work. It needs to be integrated into everything. That’s really something we’re now making the center of a lot of our Yemen work at Human Rights Watch. A lot of it revolves around land, water, and climate. In the context of Yemen, as we move forward in our work and thinking about conflict related abuses and other human rights abuses, we are thinking of integrating all of these things.