The Dar al-Hadith institution at Dammaj was founded in 1979 by Imam Muqbil bin Hadi al-Wadi'i, a Yemeni scholar who had studied at the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia. Dammaj is in the heartland of the Zaydi Shia branch of Islam, a tradition that had ruled Yemen through the Rassid and Qasimid Imamates for more than a thousand years. Al-Wadi'i's school taught Salafism, a puritanical Sunni theology, in the very center of Zaydi country. Thousands of students from around the world eventually came to study there, which was exactly the point, and exactly the problem. The expansion of Salafi thought in what Zaydis considered their ancestral home generated a Zaydi revivalist response in the 1980s, a response that would become, by the 2000s, the Houthi movement.

The Saudi state, Sunni, Wahhabi in character, supported the Salafi presence in Yemen. Saudi money funded schools, mosques, and scholarships for decades. Iran, the Shia theocracy on the other side of the Gulf, backed the Houthis, though the extent of direct material support in the early years remains debated. Dammaj sat at the intersection of both pressures. During the 2004-2010 Houthi insurgency against the Saleh government, the Yemeni government recruited over 5,000 Salafi fighters into pro-government militias. At least 69 students from Dar al-Hadith were killed during Operation Scorched Earth in 2009, fighting on the government's side. By 2011, when the Houthis took Saada city in the wake of the Arab Spring, the Salafi enclave at Dammaj was surrounded.

On October 15, 2011, the Houthis intercepted a letter in which Dar al-Hadith's Sheikh Yahya al-Hajuri urged a senior government security commander to fight against them. On the same day, Salafi students physically assaulted a 13-year-old Houthi supporter. The Houthis closed the roads. Tribes loyal to the Salafis blocked the Al Buqa road to Saudi Arabia. Al-Islah-aligned tribes blocked the Sanaa-Saada road. Fares Manaa, the Houthi-appointed governor of Saada, tried to mediate. A first tribal ceasefire collapsed quickly. On November 25, the Houthis shelled Salafi positions in the town, killing three, wounding two. Sheikh Yahya al-Hajuri declared jihad against the Houthis in return, calling them rejectionists. A raid that followed killed 24 Salafis and wounded 61, including two Indonesian students named Zamiri and Abu Soleh, both 24 years old, and two American nationals. Several Houthis also died.

On December 3, the Houthis allowed Red Cross food aid to enter the town, though not its residents to leave. Salafi students accused the Houthis of keeping a third of the supplies. The Houthis denied it. The Houthis then shelled Salafi positions on Al Baraqa mountain, killing six and injuring fifteen. On December 7, new clashes left three Houthis and four Salafis dead. On December 8, the Houthis attacked a convoy sent by the Sunni Wa'ela tribe that government officials said was bringing food and medicine to Dammaj. The Houthis called it a military convoy and a provocation by foreign forces trying to ignite sectarian violence. By the end of December a new ceasefire was brokered, with neutral armed men from the Hashid and Bakil tribes deployed around the town. In June 2012, renewed clashes killed 22 Salafi students, including two British nationals. The pattern repeated. A truce, a violation, more dead, another truce.

On October 29, 2013, Houthi forces shelled a mosque and the Dar al-Hadith school. Four thousand Salafi fighters gathered in Dammaj to defend the town. The fighting spilled into Amran Governorate in December, and by early January 2014 it had spread to Saada, Amran, Al Jawf, and Hajjah. The Houthis advanced toward Salafi positions in Kitaf and Al Buqa, and the outgunned Salafis could not hold them. In early January 2014, Houthi rebels blew up the Dar al-Hadith religious school and 20 nearby houses, destroying the symbol of Salafi presence in the town. The school was gone. A presidential delegation led by Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi arrived in Saada to broker a deal. Yemeni troops were deployed to Dammaj to evacuate Salafi fighters and their families and the remaining foreign students to neighboring governorates. The evacuation was a surrender in all but name. The Houthis won.

Over two and a half years, the siege killed more than 200 people and wounded 600, most of them Salafi. Those numbers were provided by Salafi sources; the Houthis never released their own casualty figures. Families lost homes, schools, and businesses. Foreign students, young men who had come to Yemen to study, were shipped out of the country after the school's destruction. The Dar al-Hadith school, which had been one of the most influential Salafi institutions in the Arab world, ceased to exist. The sectarian framing, Houthi-Salafi, Shia-Sunni, Iranian-Saudi, obscures what the siege looked like on the ground. Civilians in a mountain town were cut off from food and medicine while two religious communities that had been neighbors turned against each other. The larger regional contest Iran and Saudi Arabia were waging used Dammaj as a field, and the field was where actual people were living.