The American Center for Justice (ACJ) released an investigative human rights report titled “Aal Ammar Cave Cemetery,” documenting the arbitrary arrest, prolonged enforced disappearance, and extrajudicial execution of 14 civilian residents from the village of Darb Zaid, Harf Sufyan District, Amran Governorate, by the Houthi group. The report details the events spanning from the initial abductions in May 2010 to the disclosure of a clandestine mass grave inside a remote mountain cave in Saada Governorate in mid-2023.
The incident originated on May 7, 2010, during a truce following the sixth Saada war, when the local Houthi military commander, Hussein Khattar Srouh (“Abu Haydar”), raided Darb Zaid to apprehend three local youths. The resulting confrontation led to the deaths of Abu Haydar, six of his armed operatives, and five village residents. In retaliation, Houthi forces commanded by military intelligence official Abu Ali Al-Hakim and Fifth Military Region commander Youssef Al-Madani launched a punitive military assault on the village. The attacking forces forcibly evicted women and children, demolished nine homes belonging to the merchant Al-Jumayla family using high explosives, torched agricultural lands, looted vehicles and private property, and abducted 17 civilian residents.
While two detainees—one disabled and another suffering from acute psychiatric distress—were released after one year, the latter, Amer Jumaila, was subsequently assassinated in mid-2011 when a Houthi military convoy repeatedly ran him over on a public road. A third detainee, Hamid Hadi Shaiban, who was 13 years old at the time of his arrest, endured eight years of enforced disappearance and severe torture before his release in 2018. The remaining 14 civilian detainees—consisting of farmers, merchants, and manual laborers who were not combatants—were subjected to complete incommunicado detention for 13 years. Throughout this period, Houthi supervisors engaged in extortion, issued false promises of release, and systematically suppressed inquiries, including orchestrating the targeted assassinations of prominent tribal elders who sought information regarding their missing relatives.
Following an open-ended tribal sit-in in Saada Governorate in early 2023, senior Houthi leadership acknowledged that the 14 disappeared individuals had been liquidated a year after their capture. Houthi officials offered monetary compensation of five million Yemeni Rials per family in exchange for legal waivers, a settlement summarily rejected by the victims’ families. Material evidence uncovered in July 2023 at the Aal Ammar Cave in the Madhab area of Saada confirmed that the victims were bound with their hands behind their backs and executed en masse before the cave was sealed with stones and mud to conceal the crime. Following public disclosure, Houthi authorities exerted pressure on the families in August 2023 to conduct a semi-clandestine reburial at a nearby cemetery.
Under international law, the documented acts constitute crimes against humanity under the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and war crimes under Rule 156 of Customary International Humanitarian Law. Under Yemeni domestic law, including Law No. 24 of 1998 on Banditry and relevant provisions of the Penal Code (Law No. 12 of 1994), these acts constitute armed banditry, unlawful detention, and premeditated mass murder punishable by the death penalty. The ACJ calls on the Yemeni government to initiate formal judicial proceedings against all identified perpetrators, urges the international community to establish an independent international fact-finding commission, and demands that the Houthi leadership reveal the fate of all remaining forcibly disappeared individuals and immediately cease arbitrary detentions
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