45,000 Yemenis displaced by Al-Mokha battles: UN Most of those fleeing have nothing but clothes on their backs
DUBAI: Fighting around Yemen’s port of Al-Mokha has forced some 45,000 people from their homes, a UN official said Wednesday, with many facing continued uncertainty and the threat of further displacement.
Shabia Mantoo, the Yemen spokeswoman for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told AFP that data compiled by her agency and the UN Migration Agency (IOM) showed 45,000 people had been displaced in the last few weeks from Al-Mokha and the nearby town of Dhubab.
Fighting has intensified in recent weeks in the southwest of Yemen, where forces loyal to President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi are battling to retake large parts of the country seized by Shiite Houthi rebels.
Loyalist troops took Al-Mokha on Feb. 10 and announced they aimed to push north and take the country’s main Red Sea port of Al-Hodeida next.
Mantoo said many of those fleeing the fighting around Al-Mokha made their way north to Ibb district and to Al-Hodeida province.
“Eight thousand people have been displaced from Al-Mokha and Dhubab to Al-Hodeida alone, many of them with literally nothing but the clothes on their backs,” Mantoo said.
Two major concerns now are how to maintain access to the area and where the displaced will go if the fighting reaches Al-Hodeida.
“The whole country is suffering from multiple displacement,” Mantoo said. “People move from one place to another, because eventually it gets just as bad.”
The UN estimates three million people have been displaced across Yemen.
The Houthi rebels launched a deadly counter-offensive after losing control of Al-Mokha last month but were overpowered as government troops consolidated their grip on the area, inching a few kilometers north and east.
The new figure on internally displaced persons marks a sharp rise from UNHCR data released on Feb. 10, which reported 34,000 people displaced in the fighting since January around Al-Mokha and Dhubab, located in the southwestern Taiz governorate.
Yemen this month marks two years since a Saudi-led Arab coalition intervened in support of government troops in the conflict.
UN mediation efforts and seven ceasefire accords have failed to end the conflict, which has left more than 7,500 dead and 40,000 people wounded.
UN humanitarian aid chief Stephen O’Brien on Monday warned the impover- ished country now also faces a “serious risk of famine.”
Yemen, the only country in the Arabian Peninsula which is signatory to the Refugee Convention, is also home to 278,000 refugees from nearby countries including Somalia and Ethiopia, according to the UNHCR.
As of Feb. 1, the agency had received just over $700,000 of the nearly $100 million needed for its operational response to the crisis this year.