Hundreds of Yemeni students expelled from their schools because of the Houthis levies – Details
Several Yemeni areas under the control of Houthi militias have in the past few days recorded hundreds of individual and mass expulsions of students from their schools; because of the monthly non-payment of Brotherhood-imposed sums.
The latest of these reported cases was the expulsion from the school of the director of al-Tadamon School in Al Khabt district in al-Mahwit province, which is under the group’s control, of dozens of students of all ages, The Middle East newspaper reported.
Education sources in Mahwit said that the Houthi director, Saif Ali, arbitrarily expelled more than 28 students from the school after they reprimanded them in front of their classmates on the grounds that their parents could not pay the so-called “community contribution.”
This coincided with another similar incident, in which the principal of the Mujahid school in the Sawan neighborhood of the capital Sanaa expelled dozens of female students, some on the pretext of not paying taxes, while others refused in the morning queue to shout “Khomeini’s cry”.
According to the same source, a female teacher called Umat Al-Alim Al-Falahi resigned from her teaching position a few days ago at the Imam Al-Bukhari Complex in the Al-Yahari area in rural Ibb; in protest against the repeated tyranny of the putschists and in solidarity with poor students who were recently expelled from school because they could not pay the militias.
International and local reports have confirmed that the war that the Houthi group started caused the deterioration of the educational sector, millions of students dropped out of school, thousands of teachers stopped teaching because of salary cuts, fled their homes due to the group’s violence. Hundreds of educational facilities were destroyed, and some were turned into military barracks.
In a recent statement, IOM said Yemen’s education system is on the verge of collapse due to more than eight years of war.
The organization, with a posting on its Twitter account, added that 2,700 schools have been damaged or destroyed since the beginning of the war in Yemen, noting that it supports 16 schools in six displacement sites to improve access to education.
An earlier report published by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) confirmed that two-thirds of the 171,600 educational workers in Yemen have not been paid their salaries in at least four years. Some of them continue to practice their profession despite salary cuts, challenges, and other conditions.
The Yemeni Teachers Union officials had earlier announced the killing of 1,580 teachers by Houthi militias between 2015 and 2020, including 81 school principals and administrators, and 1,499 teachers, and 14 deaths due to torture in Houthi prisons, in Sana’a, Hodeidah, Hajjah and Saada governorates.
