Yemen’s Heritage Officials Are Fighting War, Looting, and Forgetting
In Yemen, the struggle over cultural heritage is now inseparable from the struggle over national identity. Mutte Ahmed Qasem Dammaj, the newly appointed culture minister in Yemen’s internationally recognised government in the south, is trying to do something unusually difficult in a country still shaped by war: recover stolen artefacts, reopen damaged cultural spaces, and persuade both officials and donors that heritage belongs near the center of reconstruction.
Dammaj is negotiating with Germany, the US, Switzerland, and France over the return of Yemeni objects trafficked abroad. But the practical obstacles are severe. The museums department in his ministry has a budget of less than $1,000 a month, and any repatriated works would need secure institutions waiting for them. In other words, the return of artefacts depends not only on diplomacy, but on basic infrastructure that remains fragile.
Since Yemen’s civil war began in 2014, the country’s heritage sites have been exposed to looting, airstrikes, and neglect. The damage is visible in Taiz, long known as Yemen’s cultural city. In 2015, Saudi coalition airstrikes badly damaged Al Qahira Castle, a 12th-century fortification overlooking the city. The National Library was burned, and the 16th-century shrine of Sheikh Abdulhadi al-Sudi was destroyed. Samira Abdel Mawla Qaed Al-Qabati, an archaeologist and the director of planning at the General Authority of Antiquities, is now overseeing reconstruction efforts at Al Qahira Castle.
The losses are not confined to Taiz. In September 2025, Israeli air strikes damaged the National Museum and other areas in Sana’a, killing dozens of people. The Salah ad-Din neighbourhood mosque, with a seventh-century structure and an Ottoman-era minaret, was also damaged. Farther afield, Marib Governorate holds archaeological remains linked to the Sabaean Kingdom and Queen Sheba, underscoring how much of Yemen’s deep past remains at risk.
Heritage workers say the country’s cultural life has not disappeared, even if it is often overlooked abroad. Dammaj points to a culture summit in Hadhramaut, a culture week in Aden, and a heritage conference in Taiz held on World Heritage Day, April 18. The cinema in Aden, which dates from the 1930s, is also set to reopen soon, and he is seeking private investment.
For filmmaker Brent E. Huffman, who helped organize the Taiz conference, Yemen represents a convergence of threats: isolation, underfunding, weak oversight, climate pressure, looting, and war. That combination, he said, makes the country a particularly severe case for cultural loss.
There is also a quieter problem: very little information about the damage leaves Yemen, in part because of media fatigue and strict Houthi controls. That silence has made the work of preservation even harder. For Dammaj and the heritage professionals around him, the task is not only to repair what has been broken, but to keep Yemen’s history from being erased in the telling.
