Taiz frontline report shows civilian toll as fighting intensifies in Yemen

Taiz residents are facing renewed shelling and displacement as fighting intensifies around Yemen's third-largest city. In a frontline report published on 27 September, BBC correspondent Nawal Al-Maghafi described abandoned homes, wounded civilians and families arriving at a camp south of the city. The visit shows the immediate human cost of the fighting, while leaving the outcome of the battle uncertain.

Al-Maghafi travelled with government forces through checkpoints to the edge of their control southwest of Taiz. When a drone sounded overhead, a soldier accompanying the BBC team warned that an attack usually followed. The team took cover and drove away; about 10 minutes later, it heard repeated strikes. The BBC could not establish where they landed or who carried them out.

Life near the front line

The BBC reported homes abandoned on slopes near the front, where shelling and gunfire could be heard. On its approach to Taiz, its team counted at least five ambulances heading towards the main hospital within half an hour. In the city after dark, it found shops open, restaurants busy and children playing, even as the sounds of fighting carried from the surrounding mountains.

A resident identified only as Ali said two mortars had landed on his property about one kilometre from the front. He told the BBC that he had sent his children to a displacement camp because they could no longer cope with the shelling and gunfire. He stayed with his wife and sisters to care for their livestock, saying the family depended on the animals for food.

About 20 kilometres south of Taiz, at al-Monig displacement camp, the BBC was told 200 families had arrived in the previous 10 days. A woman who had fled Mokha with her husband and five children said her nephew was killed by mortar shrapnel as they escaped. Another displaced woman, Fatma Mohammed Saleh, told the BBC she had crawled for two days after becoming separated from her family and had no shelter of her own at the camp.

The scale of flight extends well beyond Taiz. The BBC cited the UN refugee agency's 22 September estimate that more than 130,000 people had been displaced across Yemen so far that month, in addition to 5.2 million already displaced by the civil war. The agency warned that another 100,000 could be forced from their homes over the following three months. That projection is a warning, not a count of people already displaced.

Why the western approaches matter

The BBC said fighting around Taiz intensified after Houthi forces seized the Red Sea port of Mokha, 85 kilometres west of the city, on 10 September. It described government forces as holding central Taiz, with Houthi positions to the north and east and the fiercest recent clashes on the western approaches. Taiz sits between Houthi-controlled areas in northern Yemen and government-held areas in the south; its position makes control of routes around the city consequential to both sides.

The city has been a battleground since the Houthis ousted the government from Sanaa in 2015 and then tried to take Taiz. Local forces drove them from most of the city, according to the BBC. Maps in its report, credited to the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute's Critical Threats Project, depict contested territory as of 20 and 24 September. They do not establish what changed after those dates.

Earlier independent reporting also described the struggle along the coast. On 13 September, the Associated Press reported that Yemen's government had vowed to send more forces there after Houthi forces captured Mokha and an island on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. AP said the UN then estimated more than 80,000 people had been displaced since the start of September. That earlier estimate predates the 22 September figure cited by the BBC.

AP reported that Presidential Leadership Council head Rashad al-Alimi called the losses 'incidental' in remarks carried by the state news agency SABA, while council member Sultan al-Arada called the collapse at Mokha 'painful and regrettable' and said forces would regroup. Those were officials' assessments, rather than independent findings about the military position. AP also reported claims of strikes by both sides on 13 September without independently establishing their results.

On 23 September, Al Jazeera reported a government-side claim that government and local fighters had secured Mount Qarfan in Taiz. A Taiz military commander claimed five Houthi fighters were killed and 20 wounded; Al Jazeera reported no immediate Houthi comment. The report also attributed claims of a downed drone and Saudi strikes to Houthi spokesperson Yahya Saree. None of those battlefield outcomes was independently verified in the reporting cited here.

What remains unclear

A government fighter told the BBC that the bodies of 18 government soldiers lay in an area his unit could fire across but could not reach. That account is not a verified death toll. The BBC's visit likewise cannot establish responsibility for every shelling incident its interviewees described, or determine how the front line has moved since its team was there. For residents near Taiz, the documented danger is immediate; the battle's next turn remains unknown.