7 years of Houthi control.. What does the scene look like in Sanaa today?

Sanaa awaits with exhausted eyes the return of the spirit of diversity, the vitality of pluralistic political action, and the end of war and humanitarian crises after 7 years of Houthi control over it on September 21, 2014.

And the nature of life in Sana'a changed, like other Yemeni cities that were surprised by Venice to impose on it a new reality different from the aspirations of Yemenis in a safe and stable country.

After 7 years of the Houthis' control of power in Sana'a and the northern governorates of the country, we had a tour to convey the situation in Sana'a today, after years of fighting and destruction in Yemen.

From here, from the middle of Mount Aiban that supports Sana'a, the city surrounded by mountains and creeping between dust and hills seems to us indifferent to the effects of the bombing visible in the rubble of houses and some government institutions.

A state of anxiety inhabits the people who spend their days in the "Parks of the Fifty" overlooking the city, exchanging worries and complaints about the frustrating reality created by the war.

Hussain Al-Mandaei will serve the branches of qat and the sorrows of a country he wishes to be happy for the sake of the children of Yemen and their future.

Al-Mandaei parks his car on the sidewalk of 50th Street next to cars that fill the place, wishing that his friends who left the country because of the war would join him in the meeting.

Bitterly, Hussein bemoans a number of his friends who left Sanaa years ago because of the war and their stances on it, in reference to the fact that many of the Houthi group's opponents have left their areas of control for fear of harm.

An image showing the city of Sana'a from the 50th district (Al-Jazeera)

restrictions and repression

And Sana'a - whose streets we toured - today lost the political and media pluralism and civil activity of civil society organizations after the headquarters of political parties, opposition and civil media, professional unions, and most civil organizations were closed.

The former head of the Yemeni Journalists Syndicate, Abdel Bari Taher, told Al Jazeera Net that the Sana'a authority abolished union and political work in general, while underestimating the legitimate authority.

According to Taher, the parties to the conflict are interested in militias and military war action, and compete in canceling and weakening aspects of civil, union, journalistic and political life.

In the eyes of the Houthi group, this situation is justified because of the war it is fighting with the Saudi-Emirati coalition and the legitimate government.

However, the restrictions imposed by the group amounted to banning singing at weddings in some areas of Sanaa, and imprisoning artists for holding wedding parties late at night.

What draws the attention of a visitor to Sana’a is the intense crowding of pictures of the group’s dead and its slogans on the city’s buildings and the walls of its streets.

Nevertheless, the Houthis and their supporters celebrate the anniversary of their control of Sanaa with armed stands in the Sana’a districts to mobilize and support the battle fronts and confront what they call aggression.

The group focuses on turning the occasion into a community mobilization to support it, according to university student Ahmed Al-Nahari, who showed us messages he received via his phone from a free service for all mobile phone subscribers in Yemen.

The messages sent by the group are summed up in the fact that everyone who stands with what it calls the "September 21 Revolution" stands with the nation, and whoever stands against it stands against the nation.

Sanaa lives under a tight security grip that has restricted public and press freedoms, but citizen Samir Al-Hassani sees this as a positive thing to maintain security in the city and prevent the chaos in other governorates under the control of the legitimate government or the Transitional Council.

"If Sanaa is more restrictive of freedoms, it is also more secure than other governorates," Al-Hassani says, citing the urban development that the city has witnessed, and the commercial activity achieved by security stability from his point of view.

Bab al-Yaman and the slogans of the Houthi group (Al-Jazeera) appear on its walls.

urban and commercial activity

Sanaa witnessed a great architectural prosperity and new commercial investments despite the war and the difficult economic conditions of the majority of citizens, in a contradiction that Al-Hassani explains by the emergence of a new class of money owners and merchants brought by the war, not to mention the departure of some investors from unstable areas to Sanaa.

On our tour of the streets of Sana'a, we noticed a revival of the arms trade openly in the main streets, and arms dealers had shops in the markets and mobile cars in the streets after the markets were outside Sana'a.

On the other hand, the streets and sidewalks of the city are crowded with workers looking for work, in light of a very poor living situation with high food prices, limited job opportunities and the suspension of state employees’ salaries.

The phenomenon of begging has spread at a greater level than before, especially with Sanaa receiving a wave of internal displacement from the areas of fighting.

One of the arms shop in Sana'a (Al-Jazeera)

Suffering and crises

For 5 years, the employee Ali Al Nabhani has been staying at his home after he stopped going to his government job due to the suspension of salaries, and thousands of government employees like him.

Many state employees were forced to engage in free and hard work in order to meet the requirements of life and the requirements of their children, according to Al Nabhani.

We monitored different images of the suffering of people in Sana'a, including the inability of poor families to obtain water without community initiatives that provided water tanks in neighborhoods at the expense of well-to-do people to quench the thirst of thousands of families.

We saw women and children gathering around these tanks to bring water to their homes that were not served by government water.

One of the scenes of people's suffering is the lack of government electricity in most areas of Sana'a, in light of the prosperity of private power stations at exorbitant prices, which prompted citizens to use solar energy.

The rise in the prices of oil derivatives remains a major problem for people after the value of 20 liters of gasoline rose from 4,500 Yemeni riyals ($6.6) to nearly 11,000 riyals ($18.33), and the price of 20 liters of diesel rose from 2,000 to 3,900 Yemeni riyals.

It is noteworthy that one of the reasons for the Houthis' control of power was their protest against the government's raising of 1,500 riyals in the value of 20 liters of gasoline, and 1,900 riyals in the price of 20 liters of diesel.

The unstable conditions have contributed to the deterioration of the value of the Yemeni riyal against the dollar, from 250 riyals in 2014 to one dollar to 600 riyals today.

Sanaa remains battling its multiple and intertwined crises, waiting for the peace train to end this suffering and embrace the spirit of pluralism, politics and art.