Yemen: Hadi Jumaan, the man who picks up (under the bombs) the bodies of dead fighters at the front

Published on : 12/13/2021 – 5:17 PM

Since 2014, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and forces loyal to the government of Saudi Arabia ally Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi have been waging a merciless war for control of the country.

And it is in the governorate of Marib that the fighting has been the most violent since February: the Houthis are indeed trying to drive out pro-government forces from its most important stronghold in northern Yemen.

Hadi Jumaan often goes to the front lines in this area with his team of volunteers, to collect the bodies of dead combatants. Interventions that he negotiates on an ad hoc basis with the belligerents in the theater of fighting.

He keeps a diary on his account Twitter. In these photos published on December 4, his team of volunteers can be seen loading bodies into the back of a pickup.

_{“There was an exchange of thirty bodies, on an equal basis, between the two parties to the conflict, in Marib et al Jawf”, explains Hadi Jumaan in this tweet.}

_{“Thank God we came to an agreement to exchange four corpses on November 27; we evacuated them from the demarcation lines after several attempts, during which we were exposed to all the dangers, we found ourselves stuck under the bombardments for two days, not to mention the artillery fire[…]. It was on the front lines in Marib, ”reads this Tweet from Hadi Jumaan.}

With the young volunteers who work with me, we have experienced many dangerous situations. We have been targeted by strikes at least five times, explains Hadi Jumaan ”.

In this video, published on November 13, he is seen sheltered under a tree, for fear of being spotted by a coalition plane. [NDLR  : menée par l’Arabie Saoudite, en soutien au gouvernement d’Abdrabbo Mansour Hadi] who was carrying out strikes in the area.

Hadi Jumaan explains:

Some people ask me: ‘why are you going to the front to evacuate the bodies without coordinating with the coalition ?.’ I want to clarify to them that there is no channel of communication with the coalition. We coordinate our interventions with the parties on the front lines, locally.

And we are terribly short of resources. We don’t have body bags, for example, or refrigerated vehicles to transport the bodies. We also need a Thuraya satellite phone. Today, I must warn the belligerents two days in advance to warn them of my arrival, because the fighting most often takes place where there is no network coverage. If I’m early or late at the front, and I can’t tell them over the phone that it’s me, they can mistake me for an enemy and shoot me.

Hadi Jumaan recently launched a jackpot on social networks to be able to buy equipment.

Besides the evacuation of the dead, Hadi Jumaan participated in several prisoner exchange agreements between the Houthis and the loyalists. An activity which also brought him some setbacks:

Sometimes we are accused of not being neutral, one party accuses you of playing for the opposing party. I was imprisoned eight times by military officials who suspected me of playing for the opposing party.

_{In these photos, we see a prisoner exchange supervised by Abdallah Soltane, a colleague of Hadi Jumaan, in the region of Taez.}

But whatever the obstacles, no one will stop us from continuing our work. It is humanitarian work, work which satisfies God and which satisfies the relatives of detainees and martyrs.

Since 2016, Hadi Jumaan says he has managed to return more than 1,000 bodies of dead combatants to their families.

According to a United Nations report published in November 2021, Yemen has 150,000 deaths linked to the fighting and 227,000 from their indirect consequences, for a total of 377,000 deaths linked to the conflict.