How American tax dollars are helping starve children in Yemen
He is an eightyear-old boy who is starving and has limbs like sticks, but Yaqoob Walid doesn’t cry or complain. He gazes stolidly ahead, for in the late stages of starvation, the human body focuses every calorie on keeping the organs functioning.
Yaqoob arrived unconscious at Al Sadaqa Hospital here, weighing just over 30 pounds. He has suffered complications, and doctors say it is unclear he will survive.
Some 85,000 children may have died in Yemen, and 12 million people are on the brink of starvation, casualties in part of the three-year-old US-backed Saudi war in Yemen. The UN warns this could become the worst famine the world has seen in a generation.
“The risk of a major catastrophe is high,” Mark Lowcock, the UN humanitarian chief, said. “What we have in Yemen has the potential to be worse than anything any professional in this field has seen.”
Both the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations have supported the Saudi war in Yemen with a military partnership, arms sales, intelligence sharing and until recently air-to-air refuelling. The US is complicit in what human rights experts say are war crimes.
The bottom line: American tax dollars are helping starve children in Yemen.
Yemen is a beautiful and friendly country. But this enchanting nation is now in convulsions. When people hear an airplane today in much of Yemen, they flinch and wonder if they are about to be bombed.
This reporter interviewed officials on both sides, including the president of the Houthi rebels who control much of Yemen, and found the US and Saudi role in this conflict is unconscionable.
The Houthis are repressive, but this is not a reason to starve Yemeni children.
What is most infuriating is that the hunger is caused by failed policies in Riyadh and Washington. The starvation does not seem to be an accidental by-product of war, but rather a weapon in it.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE, backed by the US, are trying to inflict pain to gain leverage over the Houthi rebels. Why? The Houthis are allied with Iran. After a major famine, there is always soul-searching about how the world could have allowed this to happen. What’s needed this time is not soul-searching, but immediate action to end the war.
ADEN,YEMEN: