New Houthi campaign to plunder Yemeni money by collecting from school students

Nora Bandari

The Iranian-backed Yemeni Houthi militia continues its collection and looting methods to impose its control over the money of Yemenis, as it resorted to imposing compulsory donations on schools to steal students ’money for Houthi fighters on the battlefronts.

Houthi elements began carrying out the collection process on December 10, in light of the tragic economic conditions that Yemenis have been suffering from since the Houthi coup in September 2014.

Houthi teams

The students’ families announced, in press statements, that the coup militia forced them to donate for the benefit of Houthi fighters through special teams assigned to be present in schools in Sanaa to collect money from students.

The Houthi elements distribute empty envelopes to the students, who are asked to put their daily expenses allocated to the school, in support of the “mujahideen” on the battlefronts. If a student does not put money, the teams ask him to bring the money the next day, at gunpoint.

Allegations of community contribution

This is nothing new for the Houthis. In September, the terrorist group carried out a campaign of levies on public schools in Sanaa as part of a Houthi campaign under the name of “community participation”, whose main goal was to cancel free education in areas under the control of the coup militia, which violated the Yemeni constitution.

Not only that, but the Houthi militia earlier privatized public schools, which led to the deprivation of hundreds of thousands of students from free education by the beginning of the new academic year 2020-2021, as well as raising the registration fees from $100 to $160 for the elementary, middle, and high school stages, while previously approved government fees were only $3.

The Houthis aim from this to obstruct the progress of the educational process in Yemen and to create a generation saturated with the extremist ideology of the mullahs, as it is a group loyal to Iran, and it previously used schools as military barracks to train children in combat, preventing them from attending school in the service of the Iranian plan by making Yemen an Iranian province.