The widows of the Yemen civil war and their fight for survival

Hala first saw her husband’s face the day they married, when she was 15 years old. When his body was returned to her 11 years later, the face she had learnt to love had been rendered unrecognisable, blown apart by the artillery shell that killed him on a battlefield miles from home. “I screamed and I sobbed,” Hala recalls, her face obscured by the black veil worn by almost all Yemeni women past the point of puberty. “I believed my life was over.”

Her eyes fill with tears as she recounts how swiftly she fell from second-class citizenship as a Yemeni woman to a point even lower, as a widowed mother of four young children.