IOM records 274 families displaced across five Yemeni governorates in a week
Yemen Herald News 
TAIZ, Yemen — More than 1,600 Yemenis fled their homes in a single week as fighting spread across five governorates, the International Organization for Migration said.
The UN agency recorded 274 displaced families, comprising 1,644 people, between Aug. 23 and Aug. 29. It published the count in a statement on its website on Wednesday.
The account rests on IOM’s own displacement tracking. No independent confirmation of the figures has been published, and Yemen Herald could not verify them.
Taiz governorate in Yemen’s southwest accounted for 215 of the 274 families, the agency said. Most moved within the governorate rather than leaving it.
They went to the districts of Mawza, Maqbanah and Mokha, according to the agency. All three lie on or near the road running west from Taiz city toward the Red Sea coast.
The rest were spread across four other governorates. IOM recorded 23 families in western Hodeidah, 17 in central Marib, 12 in southwestern Lahj and seven in eastern Hadramout.
Safety and security concerns drove 261 families from their areas, the agency said. That is 95 per cent of the week’s total.
Twelve families moved because of conflict-related economic conditions, according to the same statement. The agency did not account for the remaining household in its published breakdown.
The weekly count lifts IOM’s running total for the year to 2,631 families, or 15,786 people, displaced between Jan. 1 and Aug. 29.
The pace has quickened since midsummer. The same count stood at 1,458 families, or 8,748 people, for the period ending July 18, the agency reported at the time.
About 1,173 families were displaced in the six weeks that followed. That is close to 45 per cent of the year’s total.
Weekly figures in July ran far lower. IOM recorded 42 families displaced between July 12 and July 18, and 37 families the following week.
The last week of August was about seven times that rate.
The geography has shifted as well. Marib accounted for 832 of the 1,458 families displaced up to July 18, or 57.1 per cent, according to the agency.
Taiz accounted for 218 families across that entire period. In the last week of August alone it accounted for 215.
Hudaydah recorded 186 displaced families between January and mid-July, followed by Hadramawt with 125, Lahj with 29 and al-Dhale with 26. Al-Jawf recorded 18, Shabwa 15, Aden five and al-Mahra four.
Marib dominated the July movements. It accounted for 84 per cent of the families displaced between July 19 and July 25, or 31 households, most of them arriving from al-Jawf and Taiz, IOM said.
Displacement fell 58 per cent in the week to July 18 against the week before it, and 73 per cent again the week after, according to the agency.
Hudaydah led that mid-July week with 25 families, ahead of Taiz with seven, Marib with six, Aden with three and al-Dhale with one.
IOM has attributed the pressure on Marib to Houthi attacks on the governorate.
The agency did not say how many of this year’s displaced had been forced to move more than once.
Fighting between government forces and the Houthi movement resumed in several governorates in early July, according to IOM. It named Marib and Jawf in the north and al-Dhale and Taiz in the southwest.
The same August week brought movement out of sites that already housed displaced people.
IOM said in a separate emergency alert that about 227 displaced families left three shelter sites in western Taiz on Aug. 25 and Aug. 26 as clashes and artillery shelling closed in.
Those families moved to the al-Suwaida and Bani Rajeh camps in al-Arish village, the agency said at the time. It reported that movement separately from the weekly figures.
Taiz has been split since 2015. Government-aligned forces hold the city, and Houthi units hold ground to its west and north.
The road from Taiz to Mokha and the Red Sea coast carries commercial traffic and aid convoys. Control of it has changed hands repeatedly.
Mokha lies on the coast north of the Bab al-Mandab strait. Its port handles humanitarian cargo for the surrounding governorates.
Yemen entered a period of reduced fighting in April 2022, when the United Nations brokered a two-month truce between the government and the Houthis. The truce was extended twice and then lapsed, but front lines largely held afterwards.
The Houthi movement has controlled Sanaa and several other cities since September 2014.
The wider aid picture for the year is set out in the humanitarian response plan published by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in March. That plan put more than 22 million people in Yemen in need of assistance.
It recorded 18.3 million people as acutely food insecure. It counted more than 2.2 million children under five as acutely malnourished, 516,157 of them severely.
The plan counted 5.2 million people displaced inside the country and sought 2.16 billion dollars to reach 12 million of them.
IOM compiles the weekly totals through field teams and partner organisations and issues them as rapid displacement tracking updates.
The agency did not publish a district-level breakdown for the four governorates outside Taiz.
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