Classrooms in rebel-held Yemen shuttered on first day of school

SANAA: Classrooms in Yemen’s capital and rebel-held north remained largely closed to students on Sunday, the first day of school, as war, hunger and an economic collapse leave millions struggling to survive.

"The future of 4.5 million students hangs in the balance," Rajat Madhok, spokesman of the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) in Yemen, told AFP.

Schools in the capital Sanaa and across northern Yemen were forced to delay the September 30 start of the scholastic year by two weeks after the rebels failed to pay teachers’ salaries. Sanaa and northern Yemen are controlled by a Huthi rebel alliance, which is locked in a war with the Saudi-backed government. Some 73 percent of Yemen’s teachers have not received their salaries in a year and many are no longer willing to continue working without pay, Madhok said.

AFP reporters on the ground in Sanaa saw a few schools opening only to register students, while many others were closed amid a strike by the national teachers’ union. In areas of Yemen under the control of the internationally recognised government, most schools opened as scheduled on October 1.

Allied with Yemeni strongman and former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Iran-backed Huthi rebels in 2014 drove the government out of Sanaa and south into Aden, hometown of Saleh’s successor Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi.