MAZRAQ, YEMEN — It was sometime after 2 a.m. when gunfire and mortars startled Oqaba Mohammed out of sleep. She thanked God she was alive and quickly gathered her four children, walking into the night and away from the only home she had ever known.
"We had nothing but the clothes on our bodies, but I didn't look back," said Mohammed, who had carried her physically disabled daughter in one arm and her 15-month-old son in the other. "We walked for three days, from village to village, asking for food from ordinary people. And then we arrived here."
Mohammed and her family were among the first wave of displaced Yemenis to make it to Mazraq, a United Nations camp in the northwestern province of Hajjah, where 7,000 people now live. They have fled the war in nearby Saada province, where the nation's army, after five years of sporadic warfare in the region, has launched what it calls a final offensive against a Shiite Muslim rebel group called Houthis.
The latest round of violence near the border with Saudi Arabia, which began in mid-August, has brought some of the most intense fighting since the war began.
A poor but strategic country on the Gulf of Aden, Yemen is increasingly unstable. Washington is concerned about the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh being embroiled in conflicts that include a separatist insurgency in the south and growing numbers of Al Qaeda fighters using the nation as a base to launch attacks across the Middle East.
The Houthi revolt plays into broader politics and animosities. Yemen has made veiled suggestions that Shiite Muslim Iran is supporting the rebels, who belong to a Shiite sect. And Sunni Muslim-dominated Saudi Arabia worries that the unrest could creep across its border, further adding to its suspicions that Iran is instigating trouble across the region.
An estimated 30,000 people have fled the northwest in the last two months, many for the second or third time, bringing the number of people displaced by this war to more than 150,000, according to news reports and United Nations records.
About 65,000 displaced people are in Hajjah and an estimated 55,000 are still living in the war zone in Saada, said Yemen-based U.N. refugee officer Andrew Knight. Many of those in Saada are living in abandoned buildings, in the mountains and on roadsides.
