On May 29, , as night fell on the Yemeni city of Taizz, state security forces and armed gangs converged on Freedom Square, a dusty encampment that had become a center of protests against President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The attackers shot protesters with assault rifles. They stormed nearby hospitals and a medical tent filled with wounded protesters.
Then they bulldozed the camp to the ground. By dawn, the forces had killed 15 protesters and wounded more than others. On November 11, in a daylong military operation, government troops killed 14 civilians in apparently indiscriminate shelling and gunfire. The victims included four-year-old Amal Abd al-Basit al-Taj, who was struck by shell fragments inside her home.
The impact was devastating. Even before , opposition to President Saleh ran strong in Taizz, a highland city and former capital of Yemen kilometers to the south of the present capital, Sanaa. At least civilians were killed in these attacks. The abuses documented in this report fall into two categories. Human Rights Watch verified the deaths of 57 people in the city from February through December in attacks on largely peaceful demonstrations by security forces, often assisted by armed gangs and snipers in civilian clothes.
The majority of those killed were protesters and three were children. Second, in June fighting broke out in Taizz between government forces and organized groups of opposition fighters dispatched by local tribal leaders to protect the protesters. The fighting involved the use of mortars and other artillery indicative of an armed conflict under international humanitarian law the laws of war. Human Rights Watch confirmed the deaths of 63 civilians, including 19 children, in shelling and shootings by security forces in Taizz during these armed clashes in The killings continued after November 23, when President Saleh signed an accord to leave office in exchange for amnesty for any crimes committed during his rule.
In early December, authorities arranged a tenuous ceasefire that continued to hold at this writing. Both government forces and opposition fighters also placed civilians at grave risk by failing to remove them to safer locations when they deployed in densely populated areas. Human Rights Watch did not confirm any killings of civilians by opposition armed groups during the period of this report, but we received accounts of these forces possibly committing four unlawful killings in December.
