Yemen: Houthis Crack Down on Christians

Dozens of Christians remain in jail in Yemen since Houthis arrested them in February 2026, in a campaign that religious freedom advocates describe as an unprecedented crackdown on Yemeni Christians.

On July 20, Open Doors, an organization that monitors global Christian persecution, reported that at least 60 Christians were arrested in Yemen at the turn of this year:

Yemen is third on the World Watch List, a place of extreme persecution for many Christians. This was brought into sharp relief at the turn of the year, when more than 60 Christians were detained in an unpresented crackdown. Some were stopped at checkpoints in the presence of their wives and children. Others were dragged from their homes in front of their neighbors and taken to undisclosed locations.

As news of these arrests swirled in the Yemeni church, fear heightened and isolation deepened. Christians were forced into hiding, some to different provinces. Phones were turned off for weeks. To avoid tracking, some were destroyed.

According to local partners, prison visits have been allowed for almost all those imprisoned. Whilst people are grateful to visit loved ones, some are taken aback at how sick the prisoners look and how much they’ve aged in such a short time.

One [Open Doors] partner is aware of a Christian prisoner who is receiving extensive religious instruction from extremists. ‘Apparently, this is a tactic used to make someone renounce his or her newfound faith and return to Islam,’ they explain.

Another family mentioned that they can only visit once a month, as their prisoner is in solitary confinement.

Prisoners are repeatedly questioned by the authorities regarding finances and whether they have been receiving money to conduct mission work in Yemen. The authorities typically raise questions about money during interrogations.

Back home, wives are struggling with juggling daily life. Without the main breadwinner, they need to find work whilst caring for their children and trying to seek legal aid for their husbands.

Even after promises of release, many Christians remain in prison. Many are expected to appear before the prosecution office, before their cases proceed to court. All this takes time in a country like Yemen. The lack of a proper legal system and obstacles from extremist groups greatly hinder lawyers from doing their job and helping innocent Christians get justice.

The Iran-backed Houthis, a.k.a. Ansar Allah (Helpers of Allah), who arrest and abuse these Christians and other Yemenis, are a Zaydi Shia Islamic terrorist organization. In 2014, they aligned themselves with the Yemeni military and took control of the nation’s capital, Sanaa. Houthi forces have since carried out grave violations of human rights, as well as war crimes, in attacks against civilians.

The Houthis have arrested hundreds of people across Houthi-controlled territory for over a decade since taking over, including UN workers, members of civil society, human rights defenders, and others exercising their right to free speech.

Yemen is now divided among several groups, including the Houthi terrorist movement, which controls Sanaa and much of the northwest; the Internationally Recognized Government (IRG), which the Saudi-led coalition supports, holds parts of the south and east; and the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a separatist group that controls much of the south. In addition to these major factions, other groups such as Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) also maintain influence in certain areas, further fragmenting control. None of those powers are sympathetic to Christians. The 1% of Yemenis from minority religions are severely marginalized in all those regions.

For the small and secret church in Yemen, 60-plus arrests is a heavy blow. In a February 2026 report, Open Doors said:

Fear remains a constant, as discovery that someone is a Christian can be deadly; in Yemen, apostasy is legally punishable by death. Christians in the northern areas (home to 80% of the country’s population) are afraid to meet, even online. They remain hiding, isolated from each other. Where they live, the area (including the nation’s capital city of Sanaa) is controlled by the Zaydi Shia Islam political/military movement the Houthis. The extremist group views Christians, especially converts, as enemies of Islam who deserve punishment, including the death penalty. For multiple reasons, Yemen is one of the most difficult countries to live in as a Christian.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch (HRW) also reported in February of this year that the Houthis launched a campaign of arbitrary detentions against Christians in Yemen, starting in late November and early December 2025:

“People were detained from streets, others from their houses,” a person HRW interviewed said. He added that in the cases they were aware of, authorities had not presented arrest warrants to any of those they were arresting. “The forces didn’t introduce themselves; we don’t know who they were. They raided houses, broke doors, and arrested people by force.” The people interviewed said that no reason has been given to detainees that would warrant their arrest.

“We are hidden communities, marginalized and targeted by all authorities in Yemen, including religious authorities,” he said. “[We are] pursued and persecuted by clerics and authorities, spread across various regions of Yemen.”

The Christian community in Yemen once numbered 41,000, including both Yemenis and expatriates, according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom:

In recent years, the community has shrunk to only a few thousand, including Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Eritrean Christians, as many have fled from the country’s violent conflict. Between October 2023 and September 2024, dozens of loosely organized Christian communities ceased gathering for worship in private entirely because of heightened security threats. Many Christian converts have fled Houthi-controlled areas of northern Yemen as a result of the Houthi’s persecution and increasing societal intolerance. In 2024, a Christian convert was reportedly killed by family members because of his Christian faith.

In 2016, Human Rights Watch reported on the then-beginning conflict’s impacts on the Christian community, including attacks on individuals and Christian institutions. Since then, Houthis, as well as other Yemeni authorities, have continued to abuse religious minorities in Yemen, such as Baha’is.

As Amnesty International reported in 2021,

Since coming to power in 2015, the Huthi de facto authorities have subjected hundreds to arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detention, torture and other-ill treatment, enforced disappearances, unfair trials with recourse to the death penalty as tools of repression to crack down on individuals they perceive as opponents or critics. The Huthis’ intolerance towards critics, including journalists, academics and political opposition, extended to religious minorities, namely members of the Baha’i community.

As recently as 2023, the Houthis detained and forcibly disappeared 17 members of Yemen’s Baha’i community, building on years of the Houthis’ systematic arrests of Baha’is.

Ironically, before the arrival of Islam in the seventh century, religions in pre-Islamic Yemen included indigenous polytheistic beliefs, with monotheism becoming increasingly prominent through Judaism and Christianity. The Kingdom of Himyar, for instance, was an ancient state located in the southern highlands of Yemen. Established in around 110 BCE, the kingdom adopted Judaism between 380 and 384 CE. As scholar Christian Julien Robin notes,

The inscriptions illustrate in increasingly clear manner that Judaism was dominant in the kingdom of Ḥimyar from the fourth century CE until around 500–530 CE; they then show that Christianity became predominant, remaining the official religion for some forty years (530–570 CE).

In a country where Judaism was once prominent, only one Jew remains today: Libi Marhabi, who is imprisoned in Yemen for his Jewish identity.

In March 2016, Houthi forces arrested Marhabi for allegedly smuggling a Torah out of Yemen. In 2018, authorities sentenced Marhabi to three years and six months’ imprisonment.

In 2019, a Houthi appeals court ordered Marhabi’s release, but security forces refused, despite releasing his non-Jewish co-defendants. U.S. then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also called for Marhabi’s immediate release in November 2020. According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom,

Houthi prison authorities have tortured and mistreated Marhabi. They have blocked communication with his family members, beat him, denied him food, administered electric shocks, and subjected him to hours-long interrogations. The torture he experienced caused all his teeth to fall out. Inhumane prison conditions have also worsened his kidney and lung conditions. After the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel, Houthi authorities transferred Marhabi to a more dangerous ward with extremist prisoners who threatened him; after a ten-day hunger strike, authorities placed him in solitary confinement.

Centuries after Islam took over Yemen, the country is divided, struggling with famine as well as a brutal civil war and largely run by groups hostile to non-Muslims, who are treated as beleaguered, second-class citizens.

“Rather than addressing the alarming rates of hunger that Yemenis are facing, the Houthis seem to only know how to arrest and detain people,” said Niku Jafarnia, Yemen and Bahrain researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Houthis should stop detaining people, including members of the marginalized Christian community, and ensure that everyone in their territory have adequate access to food and water.”

Although Jafarnia is right regarding her call, Houthi terrorists will not heed such pleas. The only way to help free the arrested and persecuted Yemeni Christians and others is for the U.S. to cut off the head of the snake, which is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Once the Iranian regime falls and Iran becomes free again, the regime’s terrorist proxies, including the Houthis, will lose their main financial and arms supplier. And if a more decent administration gets to control the Yemeni capital, this will very likely lead to more stability and liberty for persecuted minorities in the region.

Uzay Bulut is a Turkey-born journalist formerly based in Ankara.