For generations, the city of Amran had been the base of the Al Ahmar clan, the leading family of the powerful Hashid tribal confederation. Through tribal alliances and its close relationship with the Sunni Islamist Al-Islah party, the Al Ahmar family had been one of the most consequential political forces in modern Yemen. During the 2011 uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Al Ahmars had for a time made common cause with the Houthi movement - their mutual enemy being Saleh. After the revolution, the alliance fell apart. The Houthis, who follow a Zaydi Shia religious tradition, saw Al-Islah as their ideological opponent and as accomplices in the earlier Sa'dah Wars - a decade of government campaigns against the Houthi heartland. By early 2014, armed clashes were spreading from Sa'dah Governorate into Al Jawf, Hajjah, and the rural districts of 'Amran.

In the first week of February 2014, Houthi fighters attacked government-held areas in the mountains around Amran city. About 7,100 people fled during that opening round of fighting. The 310th Armored Brigade, commanded by the Islah-aligned Brigadier-General Hameed Al-Qushaibi, was the main defending force. President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi declined to reinforce it. In March, the Houthis demanded the replacement of Amran officials linked to Al-Islah. Hadi partially conceded on 8 June by appointing a new governor, Mohammed Saleh Shamlan, but refused to replace Al-Qushaibi. A ceasefire in June held briefly. On 4 July it broke, and the fighting shifted from the countryside to the city itself. Over 450,000 civilians were in 'Amran Governorate when the final battle began.

The Houthi assault on 8 July was multi-front. Houthi fighters entered Amran from the hills around the city. Simultaneously, Yemeni government reinforcements of the 310th Armored Brigade clashed with Houthi forces at Dharawan, 15 km from Sana'a. Government fighter jets bombed Amran's Warak neighborhood hours after Houthi fighters seized it. Civilian casualties mounted rapidly. On 9 July, Houthi forces reached the headquarters of the 310th Armored Brigade, overran it, looted the armory, and killed a number of soldiers and officers. They captured Brigadier-General Al-Qushaibi and killed him during the battle. With their commander dead and their reinforcements cut off, the remaining government troops negotiated safe passage out of the city. By 10 July, Amran was entirely in Houthi hands. A subsequent pact promised a Houthi withdrawal from Amran. It never happened.

After Amran, the Houthis moved their political operation to Sana'a. In August and early September 2014 they organized mass demonstrations in the capital, demanding a reversal of recent fuel subsidy cuts and the resignation of the Hadi government. On 9 September, security forces fired on Houthi protesters marching on the cabinet office, killing seven. That was the last nudge. On 16 September, Houthi fighters entered Sana'a from the north. By 21 September, the capital had fallen. In March 2015, a Saudi-led coalition began airstrikes to reverse the Houthi takeover. Ten years and many thousands of casualties later, the war those three months triggered has never ended. The city of Amran is still under Houthi control. The Al Ahmar family's political dominance, reaching back generations, ended in July 2014 and has not returned.

Amran is a small city in a mountain governorate north of Sana'a - agricultural, conservative, tribal, with an economy built on cement works and grain markets. The Houthi takeover was accompanied by relatively little of the sectarian targeting that has scarred other Yemeni cities, partly because Amran's population was already largely Zaydi. But the war since 2015 has devastated the region in other ways. Saudi airstrikes hit the Amran cement factory and other civilian infrastructure. Food prices rose, fuel became scarce, and the economy of a region already among Yemen's poorest collapsed further. Civilian rumors persist, documented by Al Jazeera, that President Hadi allowed the fall of Amran in order to remove his political rival Al-Qushaibi - that Amran was traded. Whether or not that is true, what is certainly true is that the civilians of Amran paid the price for a political calculation that was not theirs to make. They buried their dead. They rebuilt what could be rebuilt. And they are still waiting, like the rest of Yemen, for the war to end.