IOM says 227 families fled three displacement sites in western Taiz
Yemen Herald News 
MAWZA, Yemen — About 227 displaced families abandoned three shelter sites in western Taiz province in late August after clashes and artillery shelling closed in, the International Organization for Migration said.
The evacuations took place on Aug. 25 and Aug. 26, according to an emergency alert issued by the agency’s Displacement Tracking Matrix.
Security conditions around the sites had deteriorated sharply, the agency said. Concern grew for the safety of families already sheltering there.
About 120 families left the Al-Tamara site and 53 left the Al-Mahraha Al-Wadi site, IOM said. Both groups moved to the Al-Suwaida camp in Al-Arish village, in the Al-Awashiq sub-district, about seven kilometres from where they had been staying.
A third site, Bani Fatini, was emptied. Roughly 54 families were moved to the Bani Rajeh camp in the same village and sub-district, about five kilometres away.
The relocation was sudden and created urgent shelter needs, IOM said. Families reached the new sites without adequate accommodation or basic household items, according to the agency.
This account of the Mawza movements rests on IOM’s own reporting. No independent confirmation has been published, and Yemen Herald could not verify the figures.
The Mawza evacuations fell inside a wider week of movement. IOM said on Sept. 2 that it had recorded 274 families, or 1,644 people, displaced across Yemen between Aug. 23 and Aug. 29.
Taiz accounted for most of them. The agency counted 215 families displaced inside the province, most of them moving to what it called safer areas in the districts of Mawza, Maqbanah and Mokha.
Elsewhere it logged 23 families displaced in Hodeidah, 17 in Marib, 12 in Lahj and seven in Hadramout.
Safety and security concerns drove 261 of the 274 families, or 95 percent of the total, IOM said. Another 12 families moved because of conflict-related economic conditions.
The agency put total displacement in Yemen from the start of 2026 through Aug. 29 at 2,631 families, or 15,786 people.
IOM’s alert attributed the Mawza evacuations to clashes and artillery shelling without naming a responsible party. Yemeni outlets reporting on the camps have attributed the shelling to Houthi forces. The group has not publicly addressed the displacement.
Mawza district lies close to the front lines in the western countryside of Taiz. Villages and temporary camps in the area have been shelled repeatedly, according to local reporting.
The fronts west of Taiz have remained active since. Fighting flared on Thursday across several sectors, Yemen Monitor reported from the province, citing field sources.
Those sources named Al-Tawir, Al-Kadhah, Maqbanah, Jabal Al-Owaid and Al-Barh among the sectors involved, with fighting later spreading to Al-Ahtoub, Al-Kuwaihah and Jabal Ghubari in Al-Wazi’iyah district.
Government forces sent reinforcements to the Al-Kadhah and Maqbanah fronts, the same sources said. The government said its units repelled infiltration attempts across several sectors. The Houthis have not commented on that account.
Local sources quoted by Yemen Monitor described a further wave of displacement from villages in Maqbanah district and the Al-Kadhah area, including from camps already housing displaced people.
Field sources told the outlet that one aim of the offensive was to reach and sever the road linking Taiz city to Mokha, which would cut the city off from the West Coast. That assessment could not be independently confirmed.
Local reporting from the province also described about 14 ballistic missiles fired toward rural areas of Mokha, Khawkhah and several West Coast districts during the same escalation. The figure has not been independently confirmed.
Fighting between government forces and the Houthis resumed across several provinces from early July, the Anadolu news agency reported, naming Marib, al-Jawf, al-Dhale and Taiz.
Yemen has been in a period of de-escalation since April 2022, when a truce brokered by the United Nations paused a war that began about 12 years ago. No lasting political settlement followed. The Houthis have held the capital, Sanaa, since September 2014.
That calm has come under strain through 2026 as hostilities between the United States and Iran have spilled into Yemen and the Red Sea. The United Nations has warned of a return to large-scale conflict.
Saudi Arabia intervened against the Houthis in 2015. The two sides have traded attacks again during 2026 after years of relative quiet.
Houthi attacks on shipping in and around the Red Sea have also increased in recent weeks, including on vessels transiting the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the chokepoint linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden.
The displacement adds to a caseload the United Nations already ranks among the largest in the world. The 2026 humanitarian needs and response plan for Yemen, published in March, estimated that more than 22 million people in the country need assistance.
That plan put the number of acutely food insecure at 18.3 million. It counted more than 2.2 million children under five as acutely malnourished, including 516,157 severe cases.
The plan recorded 5.2 million people displaced inside Yemen and sought $2.16 billion to reach 12 million of those in need.
IOM did not say whether the families who left Mawza had received shelter materials at their new locations. Both receiving camps sit in Al-Arish village, in the Al-Awashiq sub-district, and the families travelled between five and seven kilometres to reach them.
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