Disinformation Campaigns Leave Women Working for International Organizations in Yemen Unprotected

Fatima (not her real name) was once brimming with enthusiasm for community and voluntary work in Yemen, a field in which she gained experience after completing secondary school. But she never imagined that working for a civil society organization, which she joined after graduating from university, would one day expose her to such suspicion that she would be forced to leave the country.

Fatima says that a campaign of harassment and persecution by the authorities in Sana’a, and in areas it controlled, began in 2016, and has gradually escalated from smear campaigns into direct violations.

Fatima’s story is no isolated case, but part of pattern we uncovered that has affected dozens of women working in Yemeni civil society organizations. The methods employed range from disinformation campaigns run by social media accounts to inflammatory speeches in mosque, causing direct and indirect harm to women’s security and their social and psychological well-being.

Fatima told her neighbours and those around her that she was working at an educational institute, to avoid being stigmatized as immoral. This was because they had internalized the constant false messages Fatima could hear coming from the mosque next to her apartment. Sermons inciting hostility towards organizations and the women working in them were a constant presence.

In the case of other women too, besides Fatima, misleading messages were delivered in mosques. It is ironic that, despite the different political alignments in Yemen – with the northern areas under the control of the Houthi Ansar Allah group, and the south, largely under the control of the internationally recognized government – mosques in both parts of the country use similar inflammatory language against women working in civil society organizations, exploiting the conservative nature of a broad section of Yemeni society.

One particular cleric (A.M.) made a point of delivering inflammatory addresses on a daily basis - following afternoon prayers and again between the sunset and evening prayers - attacking the morals of young women working for these organizations. He also sent male monitors to accompany the women on field visits and report back to him on their activities, according to Ilham (one of the women working for these organizations).

Another cleric (A.O.), from the town of Qataba in Al-Dhale Governorate went beyond incitement from the mosque and used social media platforms to spread misleading messages, which had serious social and psychological consequences for these young women.

Dr. Abdullah al-Qaisi, a researcher specializing in the principles of Islamic jurisprudence and the interpretation of Sharia, , believes that many of the widely circulated ideas are not based on definitive religious grounds. Some are disputed, he says, while others are based on no evidence at all. He argues that using mosques to make collective accusations or spread unfounded suspicions strips religion of its essential moral message, and transforms it from a way of protecting people into a tool for marginalising them and tarnishing their reputation.

These inflammatory messages went beyond mere words. On December 21, 2019, they led extremists to bomb the headquarters of the International Rescue Committee and its women’s support and protection center in the southern governorate of Al-Dhale. In the same month, this campaign of systematic targeting continued, exploiting the turbulent situation in the south, with offices of ACTED, Oxfam and a number of other organizations being bombed, according to the media spokesperson for the Al-Dhale Military Axis.

“Ilham” paid a heavy price for this defamation; she was forced to stay at home, and her engagement was broken off twice due to the social stigma she suffered from working with these organizations.

Psychologist Bassam Al-Aryani explains how campaigns involving the spread of false information negatively affect a working woman’s self-image through a mechanism known as “cognitive distortion”. As the lies are repeated, a woman may gradually begin to “believe them and be influenced by them” and begin to doubt her own memory and values. She loses her self-confidence and a harsh, critical inner voice replaces her positive self-perception, reflecting the distortion and misleading narratives to which she has been exposed.

Al-Aryani warns that this can develop into a complex psychological disorder, since accumulated pressures may make someone chronically anxious, constantly expecting something bad to happen. This could then develop into depression, accompanied by a sense of helplessness and an inability to experience pleasure. Socially, these women may gradually become isolated and withdraw from social occasions, thereby deepening their feelings of loneliness.

Fatima closed her Facebook account in 2020, as a result of the escalating disinformation campaigns and torrent of abusive comments she and her female colleagues working in civil society and humanitarian organizations were subjected to.

“Marwa” was also plagued by misleading, out-of-context posts, which alleged that improper mixing between men and women was taking place as part of a “soft war” (propaganda) and moral corruption. In 2015, she returned from the south to central Yemen and joined a humanitarian organization working in the health sector. However, in 2022, the authorities sought to arrest her on charges relating to promoting depravity and corruption. This prompted her family to hide her somewhere far away and to vow to prevent her from working again with such organizations or travelling for any future job.

The stigma followed her even after she moved into teaching in later years and had contact only with children, not even teenage girls.

But how are these campaigns organized?

Technical expert Fahmi Albaheth explains that creating disinformation campaigns begins with choosing a specific moment to target the victim, after she has appeared in the media or taken part in some public event. At that point, the attackers gather information about her and set about constructing a narrative designed to stir up anger in a conservative community. He says that such campaigns can also be directed against organizations as a whole, which inevitably affects the women working there.

In our analyzing of a sample of posts aimed at staff in organizations, we observed waves of content that amounted to a targeted media campaign on Facebook and X with recurring hashtags, including #Spies_America_and_Israel,#Exposing_Organisations, #Battle_for_Awareness, #Danger_of_Organisations and #Soft_War. Posts alleged that foreign organizations were in Yemen as part of a US-led cultural attack on the country. They contained allegations of spying and collaboration, moral accusations and defamation. A network analysis of the sample (the hashtags and the accounts posting them) showed that several of them were connected.

The people behind these disinformation campaigns use various detectable methods, chiefly defaming women through moral accusations, branding them as collaborators and spies, distorting or manipulating images, and fabricating conversations, documents and screenshots. They also create accounts and webpages that impersonate the victims, using real or fake images of them, and even go so far as organizing mass posting of abusive comments, threats and coordinated reporting. They also pressure women by contacting their families, or donors to the organization they work in, thereby widening the scope of harm inflicted upon them.

When it comes to the possibility of legal action against those spreading misinformation, Yemeni lawyer Huda al-Sarari points out several obstacles. Most notable is that there are no recognized technical means to track anonymous accounts. Nor is there a prosecuting authority specialized in digital evidence based on standardized criteria. The situation is further complicated by the multiplicity of different judicial and security authorities across Sana’a, Aden and other regions of the country. This makes it even more difficult to determine territorial jurisdiction. On top of that, social media platforms fail to cooperate with requests from Yemeni authorities to reveal the identities of account holders.

Al-Sarari adds that “character assassination” has become a tool used systematically against female activists and human rights defenders, usually without any serious investigation.

The danger to women is not limited to disinformation online and in mosques. It also led to the detention of Fatima and a group of her friends, after returning from a training workshop in Aden, on charges of “not being accompanied by a male guardian and mixing with the driver.” The four young women were held incommunicado at a remote security post from 11:00 pm until 5:00 am. When they tried to contact others for help, additional charges were brought against them.

It later emerged that they were victims of a smear campaign, with allegations they had come to Sana’a to spread immorality after receiving training on sexual topics at a resort in Aden. They were subsequently forced to sign a pledge not to travel again unless accompanied by a male guardian, and not to attend such “workshops”.

The pace of attacks then accelerated to an unprecedented level. In May 2024, the former head of the organization where Fatima worked was arrested while returning with his family from Aden and his home in Sana’a was ransacked and its contents destroyed.. This was followed by a series of arrests of staff working for local and international organizations in Sana’a and other areas under its control. No clear reasons for the arrests were given, and one of Fatima’s colleagues who was taken died in prison.

Two days after her former boss was arrested, armed groups, including women, raided the organization’s offices, after forcing the security guard to open them up. They then compelled the IT manager to unlock the computers and took both the security guard and the then director of the organization to a house, rather than an official detention center. There they took their phones to prevent them from contacting their colleagues, according to Fatima.

She goes on to explain that the next day they began searching and confiscating the belongings of the remaining staff.They asked the director to contact Fatima and tell her to hand over her laptop, which contained policy papers and research documents in her capacity as head of the research unit. They took the laptop and her mobile phone, which they later returned, though her phone appeared to be kept under surveillance.

Fatima says that people were arrested individually and kept apart from their colleagues and that all communication between them was cut off. What happened drove a number of female staff members to leave their jobs, and others, including Fatima, to think about leaving the country. They remained fearful, however, as their names had been circulated to security posts and border crossings.

As the campaign intensified, satellite television channels broadcast recordings of alleged confessions of “treason and collaboration” by many of the employees of the organization. The rest of the staff, meanwhile, who were still at home, waited anxiously to see what might happen to them.

In the second week of June 2024, Fatima came up with an idea. She knew it was a dangerous gamble, since any mistake could hand her attackers incriminating evidence, while the slightest suspicious movement could lead to her arrest. But, with no other option, she was forced to attempt the journey, wearing a niqab, hiding with her suitcases and her baby nephew in the trunk of a small car, after her name had been circulated to checkpoints.

From the village, she travelled with her aunt who was visiting her daughter-in-law in Aden. She was terrified at the thought of causing harm to anyone, so she stayed nearly a month in a hotel in Aden, cut off from everyone. There she followed news of the arrests and so-called confessions of “collaboration and espionage” on television. Only two or three times did she venture out, as she waited for her husband to join her.

The couple travelled from Aden to Saudi Arabia on a pilgrimage visa and stayed there with a friend for nearly a month. Later, Fatima managed to travel to a European country, where she now lives. She has no clear idea of what the future holds, just hoping that her asylum application will be accepted, now that there is no longer a place for her in her homeland.

The failure of international organizations to protect their local staff is apparent in other cases besides Fatima’s. “Ghada” (not her real name), who works at the UN Development Programme office in Sana’a, describes it like this: “The UN shows persistent negligence towards its staff, to the point where they can’t protect them; and even worse, there’s a disparity between how local, as opposed to foreign, staff are treated.”

She adds: “The organization will stand firmly behind a foreign member of staff, but leave a local employee to fend for themselves. They try to justify this dereliction of duty by claiming that a local staff member was arrested for reasons unrelated to their work with the UN, or they give assurances that they’re in contact with the authorities, when this really only makes matters more complicated for those detained.”

For “Fatima”, ‘Marwa”, “Ilham” and “Ghada”, it is the same story: inflammatory statements in mosques and on social media, resulting in social stigmatization, which then leads to trouble with the police and sometimes arrest and enforced disappearance. And all the while, international organizations stand by, powerless – or not sufficiently concerned – to protect their female staff. It is they who, often on their own, pay the price for their civil society work in an environment that is becoming increasingly hostile toward working women in Yemen.

This investigation was produced with the support of ARIJ.