New Report: Yemen ravaged by Muslim extremists, food electricity and water are scarce
An amazing new analysis on Yemen reveals a shocking devastation from the war with radical Muslims, leaving most of the nation struggling to find food, water or have electricity.
“It has been almost two years since Yemen’s third-largest city had running water or electricity,” the IRIN Wednesday report begins. “Worn down by relentless shelling and street-to-street fighting, Taiz is heading into its third year of conflict. But while the seemingly unending hostilities drag on, civilians, every day, face an ever more deadly fight: a battle against starvation.”
Citing a Reuters report on the largest food insecurity emergency in the world, the United Nation claims the nation is “one step from famine,” its hospitals and medical centers are seeing a steep increase in cases of severe acute malnutrition, known as SAM, the most critical classification of undernourishment.
Image/CIA
IRIN continues: “restricted access to food and medical care because of locally imposed sieges; spiralling costs of food and water; an increasing reliance on wages from unpaid state employees – has created an immense challenge to daily survival in Taiz.”
The article chronicles the recent history of the conflict between the “Houthis – a Zaydi Shia revivalist movement from northern Yemen” and the takeover of the country in 2014. Coalition forces pushed back the insurgency through 2015, but “Local politics and the conflicting interests of key coalition partners soon led to a military quagmire, as the city was placed under siege by the Houthis.”
What is left behind is a chaotic picture of famine, a low water table, crops which won’t grow and protests for government handouts.
The UN is attempting to gain control of the ports to bring in food, but they are being resisted. Some reports blame the U.S attacks and coalition with the Saudi government.
“For almost two years, the United States has backed—with weapons, logistics and political support—a Saudi-led war in Yemen that has left over 10,000 dead, 40,000 wounded, 2.5 million internally displaced, 2.2 million children suffering from malnutrition and over 90 percent of civilians in need of humanitarian aid,” begins Global Research, who assert that “the US-backed, Saudi-led bombing and siege that caused the hunger crisis in the first place.”
“A UN report from last year found there had “been widespread and systematic violations of international humanitarian law, international human rights law and human rights norms” by the Saudi government and its allies. The US role in the humanitarian disaster was so significant, Reuters revealed last year, the State Department was sending internal emails warning of possible US exposure to war crimes prosecution.”
“The US’s role in the war in Yemen is even more urgent of late, with President Donald Trump ramping up support for Saudi Arabia’s harsh tactics, including possibly cutting off access to the critical port of Hodeidah on Yemen’s west coast—an act that the Huffington Post (2/22/17) insists could “spark a full-blown famine in Yemen.
A first step to putting political pressure on Trump to mitigate the suffering in Yemen is for the US public to speak out about their government’s role—a condition unlikely to be met if corporate media never bother to mention it.”
photo/ Michael Jarmoluk via pixabay
