By Ruth Styles for MailOnline. Since the Arab Spring in , Yemenis have endured intermittent fighting, attempted coups and increasing violence but now, with Houthi militiamen advancing on the beleaguered forces of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi in the second city of Aden, things look increasingly bleak. With the capital Sana'a also in the hands of the Iran-backed rebels, women and children are now on the front line of a conflict that, last night alone, saw an estimated 40 people perish after Saudi war planes apparently bombed a refugee camp. Now a haunting new set of photos has shed light on what Yemen stands to lose, including a Bedouin minority that has lived in Yemen - and neigbouring countries such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia - for thousands of years. Under threat: These women were photographed in Amran, a town that fell to the Houthis last summer and is now being targeted with air strikes.
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The forgotten queen
Child marriages are mounting dramatically in the Arab world's poorest country, fuelled by a war that has thrown society into turmoil. He lost his businesses, the family became destitute, he began abusing Nasrine, and they divorced, she said. As the fighting grinds on into its third year, millions of families are unable to make ends meet, and more than 3 million people have been driven from their homes, ending up in camps. Local organisations working to end child marriage point to what they consider numerous egregious cases. Another man married off his daughter three times in two years for repeated dowries, all before she turned In another case, a child bride who had been handed over by her father in exchange for a taxi bled to death after being forced to have sex days after her wedding. There is no minimum age for marriage in Yemen.
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For a few hours after The New York Times published an article about conflict and hunger in Yemen, Facebook temporarily removed posts from readers who had tried to share the report on the social platform. The article included several images of emaciated children. Some were crying. Some were listless. One, a 7-year-old girl named Amal, was shown gazing to the side, with flesh so paper-thin that her collarbone and rib cage were plainly visible.
His works deal with themes ranging from sexuality and gender to tradition, and they have caused controversy and sparked heated debates about the social and cultural results of the widespread conservatism that has been growing rapidly across the region over the last 40 years. The first time he ever held a camera in his hands he turned it on himself; and today, he still uses himself as the subject of much of his photography. Using his own image as his subject speaks volumes about his style of art. And it is because of this that his works have been banned in Yemen. Nevertheless, he has now returned home after several years in the USA to put pressure on the existing structures within a culture that he sees as one-way street of censorship and injunctions. This represents a good example of the censorship plaguing Yemen and making it easy to shock Yemeni audiences. This work consists of three photographs of a woman covered in only by a red-patterned cloth, reclining elegantly on a green, sun-drenched lawn. In the last of the three photographs, she has discarded her attire completely and the viewer sees only her bare legs standing on the cloth on the grass. I wanted to create a series of pictures that remind us of how Yemeni women used to be. In actual fact, there once was a time when Yemen was ruled by a woman — The Queen of Sheba — but when you think of a Yemeni woman today, you think of an abused, uneducated child-bride who has been forced into marriage.
