The school bag he left behind: in Taiz, a generation waits outside closed classrooms

Ahmed is twelve, and his school bag is in a house he can no longer enter. Two weeks ago, fighting reached his village of al-Ashroh, west of Taiz, and his family fled to a displacement camp in the Jabal Habashi district. There is no school in the camp. The school he left behind is closed. What fills his days now is the shape of every displaced childhood in Yemen's renewed war: waiting, under canvas, for adults with guns to decide when learning may resume.

He is one of more than 137,000 students whose education has been suspended, according to UNICEF, as 243 schools across conflict-affected parts of Yemen have closed or halted classes. The agency says more than 57,000 children were displaced in the first two weeks of September alone, and the United Nations put the total displaced by the renewed fighting at more than 150,000 by early October, on top of the more than five million Yemenis driven from their homes since the war began in 2014.

The mechanics of the loss are brutally ordinary. A displacement coordinator in Jabal Habashi described schools falling into three groups: those turned into shelters for the displaced, those still open but too crowded to take one more child, and those sitting on or near the front lines, empty. A displaced child who wanted to walk several kilometres to a functioning school would find no desk waiting. Teachers describe children crying at the sound of heavy gunfire; education, one Taiz teacher said, cannot happen where students hear explosions and sleep in shaking tents.

And this blow landed on a system already on the floor. Before this escalation, 3.2 million Yemeni children were out of school entirely. Roughly 12.2 million children need humanitarian assistance; more than 2.2 million children under five are acutely malnourished. The fighting has also disrupted services at health facilities and cut access to safe water for communities already hosting far more people than their clinics and wells were built for.

What a closed school does to a displaced child does not end when the guns pause. Rights workers warn that children outside classrooms drift towards homelessness, begging, labour and, in the darkest Yemeni pattern, recruitment by armed groups. A sociologist in Aden has warned of a 'new illiterate generation' if thousands more students are kept out for long. The bag Ahmed left in al-Ashroh is a small object carrying a large wager: that the war will end before the habit of school does. Every week of closure raises the price of returning, and it is children, as always, who are made to pay it.