Looking out from a grid of thumbnail-sized pictures, women and children hold placards; forlorn expressions on those with uncovered faces.
“Bring back my son”, reads one; “Bring back my brother”, says another; and “Bring back my father”. All are relatives of men who have been disappeared in Yemen.
The picture has come to me by WhatsApp, sent by a group known as the Abductees' Mothers Association.
They are just a handful of those left in anguish by some of the hundreds of forced disappearances of their loved ones in Yemen, a country in which rebels and pro-government forces have been at war since 2015.
It is a phenomenon that has become increasingly worse in the past four years.
An independent human rights group, Mwatana, has been monitoring cases of arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, torture and deaths in detention across Yemen, documenting many in a recently released report.
One – 21-year-old Othman Abdo – was snatched nearly four years ago by gunmen in civilian clothing from the courtyard of the mosque next to his house in Hamdan, a district near the…
