Taiz stands as a central case for understanding the political and social transformations that have unfolded in Yemen since the eruption of the ongoing conflict. The city functions as an open laboratory for observing the interplay among various actors operating within the country’s complex war environment. Within this context, the Islah Party emerges as the most dominant force in Taiz—exerting substantial political, military, and social influence across the city’s landscape.

The Islah Party’s experience in Taiz, since its participation in the resistance front against the Houthis, represents a decisive juncture in its structural and functional evolution. At the early stages of the conflict, the party positioned itself as a leading political actor championing the cause of “state restoration.” However, its political and field practices soon revealed a profound shift — from the logic of resistance to that of domination. This transformation laid bare a more profound crisis within the party’s ideological and organisational fabric, as well as in its relationship with the very notions of the state, legitimacy, and authority. Its conduct came to be marked by exclusionary tendencies, the instrumentalisation of violence, and the reproduction of authoritarianism — all cloaked in the rhetoric of liberation and resistance.

The party gradually transformed from a political actor into a de facto authority, consolidating its dominance over the military and security apparatus and subordinating these institutions to the imperatives of organisational loyalty rather than to merit or the rule of law. The first manifestation of this consolidation appeared in its confrontation with Brigadier General Adnan al-Hammadi, commander of the 35th Armoured Brigade, who embodied the last autonomous regular military force in Taiz—distinguished by his independent command decisions and broad popular support. His assassination in 2019 constituted a pivotal moment in entrenching Islah’s unchallenged supremacy within the city. This was soon followed by the expulsion of the Abu al-Abbas brigades under the pretext of unifying the security front—an action that, in essence, sought to eliminate any competing centres of power that might challenge the party’s expanding hegemony.

As a consequence, the state's official presence receded into little more than a symbolic façade. At the same time, the city evolved into a closed partisan enclave that monopolised local revenues, obstructed the transfer of resources to the Central Bank, and appropriated public institutions and private properties alike. This process was accompanied by recurrent waves of home looting, political assassinations, and extrajudicial killings, through which the city’s civic fabric eroded and the boundaries between political authority and coercive power dissolved. In this atmosphere, the official narrative became a mere echo of the party’s organisational will, branding every dissenting voice as treacherous and accusing it of conspiracy.

This transformation exposed the profound fragility of the city’s institutional foundations. It revealed how partisan dominance can usurp the state's functions—draining society’s vitality and eroding the very foundations of any developmental or national endeavour. Amid the complicit silence of the party’s followers in the face of these destructive practices, Islah metamorphosed from a political organisation into a closed sectarian entity, complete with its own rituals, lexicon, and mechanisms of inquisition.

This evolution did not occur overnight; instead, it was the culmination of a deliberate process of psychological and social engineering sustained through a network of interlocking mechanisms. Foremost among these is the monopolisation of absolute truth within the party’s internal structure, whereby members are not expected to evaluate the validity or fallibility of the party’s positions but to embrace them as immutable certainties beyond scrutiny. Complementing this construct is a meticulously crafted system of rewards and sanctions, through which employment opportunities, privileges, security guarantees, and even social acceptance within the surrounding milieu become conditional upon absolute obedience and uncritical allegiance.

To this end, the organisation has fashioned a distinct conceptual lexicon that redefines political assassination as the “elimination of a traitor,” arbitrary detention as a “necessary security measure,” and the looting of private and public property as an “enhancement of the resistance’s position.” Through this linguistic engineering, the party systematically reconfigures its members’ perception of reality, demonising dissent and recasting every act of violence against opponents as a legitimate defence against an alleged external conspiracy. In this way, members are kept in a perpetual state of mobilisation and siege, wherein the individual—once subsumed within a coercive organisational structure—gradually loses moral independence and becomes a mere cog in a mechanism that erodes critical reasoning and human empathy alike, rendering him, often unwittingly, complicit in acts he might once have condemned.

In the modern state, freedom is a natural right inherent to every individual—one that may only be granted or restricted in accordance with the law. Under the patrimonial model imposed by Islah, however, freedom is redefined as a conditional “privilege,” bestowed upon loyalists and denied to dissenters. Freedom of expression, for instance, is safeguarded for those who extol the party or remain silent about its transgressions, yet criminalised when exercised by its critics. Similarly, the right to assemble is permitted for party-sponsored events but proscribed for demonstrations seeking the restoration of fundamental rights that the party itself has usurped.

Accordingly, the party does not regard rights as inviolable principles but rather as instruments of political utility. This approach renders the establishment of a genuine state impossible, for an actual state is grounded in the equal recognition of rights, not in the selective distribution of conditional privileges. This patrimonial and exclusionary mindset extends to the very essence of nationhood itself. When a religious–political organisation monopolises state institutions and converts them into tools for its own service, it drains the concept of the homeland of its meaning, stripping citizens of their sense of ownership and transforming the state into the private domain of the party that controls it.

Within this exclusionary ideological framework, the political other is constructed as an existential negation rather than as a fellow citizen. Disagreement—or even mere difference—is reframed from an expression of pluralism into an existential threat to be neutralised or expunged from the public sphere, whether by arbitrary detention, assassination or the overt use of force.

A tragic paradox emerges: the Islah Party, while presenting itself as an alternative to the Houthis, operates under the same patrimonial logic as its adversary. The Houthis seized the state in the name of a “revolution against corruption,” only to transform it into a sectarian, family-based fiefdom. Likewise, Islah, under the banner of “resistance,” exerts control over parts of the state and converts them into an ideological partisan enclave. In both cases, the state is perceived merely as spoils to be divided, dissent is systematically suppressed, and each cloaks its practices in the language of religious legitimacy.

The cumulative setbacks endured by Islah since 2011 transformed Taiz from an ordinary governorate within its zone of influence into the party’s “last refuge” — the locus of existential survival and the ultimate line of defence that could not, under any circumstance, be compromised. This distorted consciousness of survival engendered an acute repressive impulse in which moral and legal boundaries collapsed, giving rise to a mode of governance defined by coercion rather than restraint.

This, precisely, explains the range of practices that have unfolded in Taiz: arbitrary arrests, the suppression of peaceful protests, the seizure of state institutions, and the systematic silencing of critical voices. Such conduct is not that of a self-assured political party but instead of an organisation gripped by the fear of extinction. The distinction is fundamental: the former acts from a position of strength and self-confidence. At the same time, the latter operates out of anxiety and fragility, driven by a siege mentality that confuses survival with domination.

By contrast, society in Taiz—across its diverse political and social spectrum—seeks neither exclusion nor retribution, nor the settling of ideological accounts. Its aspiration, articulated with clarity and persistence, is to restore the abducted state, reclaim the civic essence of authority, and rebuild institutions grounded in the rule of law rather than the calculus of loyalty.

The Islah Party must recognise—and herein lies the essence of any genuine solution—that the mounting calls for security and administrative reform are not attempts to dismantle or marginalise it, but rather endeavours to rescue all parties from the spiralling chaos consuming the city, its reputation, and its future. This necessitates the establishment of clear and confidence-building parameters: that Taiz remain a city belonging to all its inhabitants, not the exclusive domain of any single organisation; that its institutions—security, financial, and service-related—function as instruments of the state rather than extensions of partisan control; that political and intellectual pluralism be upheld; that public freedoms be preserved; and that every actor, without exception, be held accountable before the law.

True transformation can only begin when the party realises that its political future cannot be safeguarded through monopolising violence, decision-making, and resources, nor through deeper entrenchment and isolation. It must instead summon the courage to embrace openness and place its trust in the just state as the true guarantor of collective security. Only by shifting from a barracks mentality to a state ethos, and from a culture of fortification to one of partnership, can the foundations of genuine change be laid.

Today, Taiz stands in need not of victors and vanquished, but of equal citizens. Its struggle is not to eradicate any group, but to eliminate the chaos that continues to erode its social and institutional fabric. The objective is not to topple a particular organisation, but to establish a state that accords respect to all and subjects all to accountability. What is sought is not the exclusion of the party from the political arena, but the exclusion of militia logic from the institutional order. The distinction between these two aims is immense—and recognising it constitutes the key to any enduring resolution.

Taiz—having withstood the siege with extraordinary courage—now deserves liberation from another, more insidious form of siege: the siege of fear that transforms the city into a barracks, its citizens into subjects, and politics into spoils of power. Should it succeed in overcoming this state of paralysis, Taiz will not only have redeemed itself but will have illuminated a path for Yemen as a whole—a path leading from the logic of militias to that of institutions, from a culture of domination to a culture of citizenship, and from a geography of fragmentation to a state that truly belongs to all.