Yemen is the world’s forgotten war
BEIRUT – It’s been called the forgotten war – and with good reason.
The war in Syria gets clicks and shares, and the fight to defeat Islamic State is never far from the headlines. But Yemen, a top contender in the devastation and suffering index, often goes unmentioned.
With more than enough global conflict and misery to go around, why should you care about Yemen, a country roughly the size of Texas and tens of thousands of miles away? Here’s why: It’s the world’s worst humanitarian disaster It’s true. In a donor conference in April, Antonio Guterres, the U.N.’S secretary-general, described Yemen as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”
To understand why, it’s worth knowing that Yemen was long a place where millions were never certain when and from where they would get their next meal or drink of clean water. And that was before the threeyear civil war now raging through the country.
These days, Yemen’s woes sound like a modernday biblical tale.
Since early 2015, more than 10,000 people have been killed, many more wounded and 2 million driven from their homes because of the fighting between a Saudi-led coalition (composed of the Emirates, mercenaries, and a hodgepodge of militiamen including jihadis) and Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.
For most people, death comes from above, with warplanes from a Saudiled alliance constantly sweeping the skies. Yes, the U.S. is involved –
like it or not Behind every bomb dropped in the nearly 17,000 air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition on Yemen U.N. Secretary-general Antonio Guterres attends a news conference on June 11 at the United Nations in New York.
are support services provided by the U.S.
At the behest of lucrative arms deals worth billions of dollars (Saudi Arabia alone spent $69.4 billion on arms in 2017, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, giving it the world’s third-largest military budget), the U.S. supplies much of the hardware used by the Saudis and Emiratis, while also offering midair refueling and general intelligence sharing.
“The U.S government is complicit in the suffering of civilians in Yemen,” said Samah Hadid, Amnesty International’s director for Middle East campaigns. “Through irresponsible arms transfers to the Saudi-led coalition, U.s.-manufactured weapons have been used to kill civilians.
“In one strike alone, we were able to verify that U.S bombs were used to attack an entire residential building, leaving scores of children and families killed.”
Yet the Houthis, though they are backed by Iran, pose little direct threat to the U.S. and are not listed as a terrorist entity.
And the U.S. appears to have stepped up its activities in the country. The New York Times reports that a contingent of Green
Berets is now stationed on the Saudi side of the border with Yemen in a bid to secure it against the Houthis.
The involvement continues despite heightened scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers. In February, the Senate blocked a resolution that would have ended U.S. participation in the war in Yemen, but legislative efforts to do so are ongoing.
It’s home to a resurgent Al Qaeda With all the focus on Islamic State, it’s easy to forget that al-qaida is still hanging around. Yemen is not only home to the group’s most dangerous franchise, al-qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, but also where it pulled arguably its greatest triumph: In 2015 the jihadis took over Mukalla, Yemen’s third-largest port.
The port became the centerpiece of a Qaida fiefdom, comparable to Islamic State’s so-called capitals of Raqqah and Mosul. It boasted $100 million in bank deposits and the jihadis even sought to export crude oil, according to a Reuters report. The group administered the city’s affairs for the year it was in control, before abandoning Mukalla to United Arab Emirates government loyalists.