IV. The Victims

Most of the 45 protesters killed in the Friday of Dignity shootings were university students. The youngest was 16 years old—one of three juveniles killed—and the oldest was 50. All of the dead and most of the wounded were male. The dead include Jamal al-Sharaabi, a 35-year-old Yemeni photographer, the first journalist killed in the Yemen uprising.[105]

All of those killed and at least 40 of the 200 wounded—10 of them children—were shot in the head, chest or other areas of the upper body.[106]

Protesters named the area of the shootings Martyr’s Square and turned it into a shine, adorned with portraits of the dead.  But that is nearly all the recognition the victims have received. To date, the severely wounded and relatives of the dead have received almost no government assistance, according to the survivors’ lawyers.[107]

The following are brief portraits of two protesters who were killed and two who were wounded in the attack, based on Human Rights Watch interviews with the wounded, witnesses, and relatives.

Salah Abdullah al-Shurmani

The third-floor apartment in Sanaa where Salah Abdullah al-Shurmani lived with his family,   located on a trash-strewn street, is reached by a rickety, outdoor stairwell smelling of sewage and lit at night only by a guide’s flashlight.

In contrast to the squalid exterior, the family’s sitting room was a carefully arranged shrine to al-Shurmani’s memory, filled with photos of him as a smiling, seemingly carefree youth. Even the clock on the wall bore his likeness.

Al-Shurmani was 22 when he was killed in the Friday of Dignity attack. He had hoped to attend a university, his relatives said. But the family could not afford to send a potential breadwinner to school, so instead he worked in his father’s tailor shop. When the uprising began, said al-Shurmani’s mother, Zainab Ahmad Muhammad Saleh, her son joined the weekly protests at Change Square:

My son went to protest because the young people are fed up and they wanted change. The people cannot live well. They cannot complete their education. The prices are sky-high. The people are turning into street beggars … In Europe, they care for cats and dogs but here the people eat garbage.[108]

The morning of the Friday of Dignity attack, al-Shurmani told his mother he would be home for lunch, then headed off to Change Square. His mother cooked him a big meal but the food grew cold and hours passed:

I called his brother Muhammad but there was no answer. I stood on the roof and I could see the helicopters circling in the area of Change Square. I was crying and praying to God to protect the young men there. Finally around 5 p.m. Muhammad came home. He was in tears. He said, “It’s Salah. He’s a martyr.”[109]

Zainab Ahmad Muhammad Saleh (left) in Sanaa with a poster of her son Salah Abdullah al-Shurmani , who was shot dead in the Friday of Dignity massacre. The Arabic text on the poster gives al-Shurmani’s name, date of death, hometown, and the phrase, “martyr of freedom and change.” It also includes a line from a prayer that begins, "Think not of those who are slain in the cause of Allah as dead.” At right, Salah’s brother Muhammad al-Shurmani. © 2012 Letta Tayler/ Human Right Watch

Muhammad al-Shurmani was also at Change Square that day. Sometime after 2 p.m., he said, he got a call from friends who had been with his brother, saying Salah had spotted him in the crowd and was crossing a traffic circle to join him when a bullet pierced his chest. Muhammad ran to the protesters’ field hospital at the mosque in Change Square:

At first I couldn’t get in because the crowds were so big. Finally I entered the courtyard of the mosque and I walked past the wounded. Saleh was not there. So I went inside the prayer hall and I saw many more wounded. Salah still was not there. Finally I looked through the rows of dead, in the area where the imam stands. And Salah was there. He was shot in the right side of the chest.

I walked all the way home [about 5 kilometers]. All I could think was how to tell my father and mother? I did not dare go inside to talk to them. I just stood downstairs. Finally my mother saw me, and she sensed something was wrong. She came down to me and I told her.[110]

Al-Shurmani’s mother said the family wants justice, not just compensation:

They trapped the young people with walls so they could not escape the assassins. And then they killed them, these men in full bloom of youth. And then the parliament gave the members of the former government immunity.  … We want a fair trial. Compensation is not enough.[111]

Anwar al-Maeti

When the trial for the 78 defendants in the Friday of Dignity case opened on September 29, 2012, Abd al-Wahed al-Maeti stood in the courthouse, holding aloft a poster of his son Anwar, fashioned from a tattered photo mounted on the back of a cardboard box.

Anwar, 16, was the youngest of those killed in the attack. In the photo, his face is boyish. He wears a white headscarf and an excited grin. The protesters at Change Square named him “Shahid  al-Fatih,” the martyr who opens the door.

Anwar was shot dead as he ran toward the house of the Mahweet governor with the first wave of protesters who tore down the wall and tried to catch the gunmen. A bullet struck him as he opened the door to the governor’s house and tried to enter.

The father described his son as the best student in his class, with dreams of becoming a doctor:

He was frustrated. He felt that under the regime it would be impossible for him to go to medical school because that was only for those who were powerful and their friends.[112]

Abd al-Wahed al-Maeti holds a photo of his son Anwar al-Maeti, 16, the youngest protester killed in the Friday of Dignity shootings, outside a court hearing in Sanaa on the massacre. The Arabic reads, “Responsibility for our bloodshed rests on your shoulders,” and “Pray for him, he is dead.” Anwar’s photo is also on the sheath of father’s jambiyya, a traditional Yemeni dagger. © 2012  Letta Tayler/ Human Rights Watch

When the uprising began, Anwar continued his studies, but spent afternoons and weekends at Change Square, his father said:

I tried several times to convince my son to stay at home and not go to Change Square because it was dangerous. His answer was, “Father, if you keep me at home and each father keeps his children at home, then who will change our situation?”

Like many other victims’ relatives, al-Maeti said he wanted those responsible prosecuted. Asked about the law that the parliament passed granting immunity to former President Saleh and his aides, he said: “It was given by those who had no right to give to those who did not deserve to receive it.”[113]

Salim al-Harazi

Salim al-Harazi, 13, arrived at an interview with his dark hair carefully combed, his shirt perfectly ironed, and mirrored sunglasses covering the scars where his eyes used to be. He stepped carefully, his hand on the shoulder of his younger brother, Saif, who guided him into the room.

Only 11 at the time he was wounded, Salim said he could not resist joining the protesters at Change Square for the Friday of Dignity rally. He slipped away from home the night before.

“The former president said he would protect the protesters,” he told Human Rights Watch. “So I thought I would be safe.”[114]

Ionia Craig, a freelance journalist, blogged about seeing Salim with two other boys in a tent at Change Square as the bullets began to fly:

Shielded from the brutality of what was happening just a few feet from them by a thin white sheet of material, the boys joked and laughed. Two of them wore plastic [construction] helmets that had been distributed around the protest camp as protection from flying rocks, which had become a common weapon in the street battles of recent days. … It was glaringly obvious that the now partially collapsed tent was going to offer little protection from the AK-47 bullets flying through the air. Unable to express my concern [in Arabic] to the giggling boys I motioned for them to leave the tent, as I was about to. They declined.[115]

Salim did run out shortly after, but not for shelter. “We saw the fire behind the wall. I went to see,” he told Human Rights Watch. “We saw balatija. They threw stones at us and we threw stones back. We saw bullets coming from behind the wall.”[116]

A bullet struck Salim below his nose, then crossed from his right eye to his left eye. When he woke up the next day at the Science and Technology Hospital, a private medical center in Sanaa that was treating wounded protesters, doctors had removed both of his eyes.

Salim al-Harazi (left) and his younger brother, Saif, in Sanaa, October 2012. Salim lost both of his eyes from a bullet wound during the Friday of Dignity shootings on March 18, 2011. © 2012 Letta Tayler/Human Rights Watch

Salim told Human Rights Watch that he wants to be a religious scholar. First, he said he wants to learn to read Braille and to receive cosmetic surgery. The Wafa Organization to Support the Families of the Martyrs and Injured,  a group  that provides assistance to wounded protesters and families of the those killed, has been helping Salim obtain basic treatment, but neither the clinic nor Salim’s family can afford the cosmetic surgery.

Jabir Saad Ali Jabir al-Mandaliq

Jabir Saad Ali Jabir al-Mandaliq, a 28-year-old religious scholar from Amran, a province directly north of Sanaa, said he joined the Change Square protests because he was unable to find work teaching the Quran.

I came to Change Square to demand our freedom, dignity and rights. The people in my area are illiterate. They can’t even read the Sura al-Fatiha [the opening chapter of the Quran]. But the elite have squandered Yemen’s wealth. That is why I was unemployed.[117]

Jabir Saad Ali Jabir al-Mandaliq, Sanaa. © 2012 Letta Tayler/Human Right Watch

The night before the attack, al-Mandaliq told Human Rights Watch, rumors were rife of an impending attack. “My brother came to me and said, ‘Leave, I am afraid you might be killed.’ I said to him, ‘I will never leave. I came on a peaceful mission for change.’”

Al-Mandaliq was shot as he pushed past the remains of the wall:

They were shooting at us directly, some from the rooftops. I thought it was the end. I began praying to Allah, “There is no God but God…” The next thing I knew I was shot. The bullet entered my  right side and exited the left. People I didn’t know evacuated me in a blanket. A friend saw me and wept.

The bullet wound left Jabir paralyzed from the waist down. Two pieces of his spinal cord were shattered and doctors removed 50 centimeters of his small intestine. He urinates into a bag attached to his bladder by a tube.

Al-Mandaliq would like to live in Amran, where he has family, but he needs to be in Sanaa for medical care. He said he is in constant pain and despairs of any improvement:

My legs are becoming so much smaller. Some doctors tell me there is still some hope I can walk. But some doctors tell me I can never walk again.[118]