Yemen Conflict: Country On Brink Of Famine

“The scale of human suffering is nearly incomprehensible”.

“Children Under Threat”, found that at least 398 children had been killed and 605 injured since the conflict the country started in March.

Save The Children said more than 1,000 children have been killed or injured in the fighting in Yemen and the number of young people recruited or used as fighters is increasing.

“The educators were gathered together to prepare exams for thousands of children who had missed the end of their school year because of this brutal conflict”, the agency said.

“Working after hours, they had brought their children with them”. “A selfless activity turned in a moment into senseless bloodshed”.

Across the country, almost 10 million children – 80 per cent of the country’s under-18 population – are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. “More than 1.3 million people have been forced to flee their homes”, the report stated.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) warned on Thursday that Yemen’s conflict has left it on the brink of starvation.

However, Rima Kamal, spokesperson for the global Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Yemen told CM that the ICRC has been informed by the local port authority that two out of nine piers are damaged while the rest are still capable of being operational. Sana’a is the capital and is under Ansarullah fighters and Popular Committees control.

The Ansarullah is said to receive military help from Iran, which has no troops on the ground.

On Thursday evening, Saudi-led Arab coalition warplanes carried out six air raids on Houthi positions in Salah, according to eye witnesses.

But the crisis dates back to 2011 when street protests began against poverty, unemployment, corruption and discrimination.

Saudi Arabia is not a signatory to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and has been provided with the weapons by the US, a provision that traditionally comes with at least an implicit admonishment not to use them except under very particular circumstances, to which the Saudi war against Yemen would certainly not apply. O’Brien briefed the Security Council Wednesday on his just completed trip to Yemen, saying he is shocked by what he saw.

Is it time to talk? “Prospects of a political solution are dim”. The UN special envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, a Mauritanian, has already met with Ansarullah and Saleh’s representatives in Muscat, Oman, to discuss a package deal that would facilitate a ceasefire and a move to political negotiations. Some Yemeni officials are now in Aden but the government remains in Saudi Arabia.

For the Gulf Arabs, bristling at Iran’s role in sectarian wars rocking Syria and Iraq, the gains in Yemen prove they can seize their collective destiny from their arch-rival, even as their ally the United States has reached a nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic last month.