Yemen death toll to surpass 230,000 – what next?

Now that United Nations warns that about 231,000 Yemenis will have died from hunger, disease and lack of health clinics by the end of this year, it should do the next best thing: force the Saudis to stop the war on this defenseless nation.

At least this could help prevent further fighting which the world body says will have claimed about 102,000 lives by the end of 2019. This includes those who might die “from hunger, disease and the lack of health clinics and other infrastructure than from fighting.” For more on the Yemenis’ mishap stay tuned with an article published by Fars news agency titled “Yemen death toll to surpass 230,000 – what next?”

According to the UN’s latest report called Assessing the Impact of War on Development in Yemen, many people will have died from the side effects of the conflict and not the actual fighting, with the combined death toll - from fighting and disease – at “233,000, or 0.8 percent of Yemen's 30 million-strong population.”

This is not to mention the costs of those five years of conflict that has already cost Yemen’s economy $89 billion and counting. It’s all the reason why the war-torn country, the poorest nation in the Arab world, needs a temporary cessation of hostilities now. There is no need for the failed war to drag on until 2030 or further – an unnecessary war that the UN says could set back the country by 26 years.
All this, of course, depends on the United States as a culprit for the Saudi crimes against the impoverished nation. The US has been arming Saudi Arabia and its so-called allies since March 2015, including refueling their warplanes mid-air and providing reconnaissance and targeting intelligence information. The international backlash has been so widespread that Congress was forced to approve a bill to end US support for the Saudi-UAE war on Yemen, which was vetoed by President Donald Trump.
However, according to the UN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and a maze of other international rights groups and aid agencies, the air raids by the US-backed, Saudi-UAE coalition have mostly hit civilians, hospitals and water treatment facilities. They estimate as many as 60,000 civilians have been killed in these raids and “as many as 85,000 children starved to death, with millions more one step away from famine.” 

Worse still, international aid groups say the Saudi-UAE military authorities are recruiting Yemeni children, many of them desperately poor, to fight along the Saudi border against the popular Ansarullah forces. This goes against the Charter of the United Nations and international law, which prohibit the use of children in armed conflicts.

Into the argument, Washington claims its military support to Saudi Arabia is designed to stop Iran’s influence in Yemen, which is not true or substantiated by any evidence. Iran has no forces in Yemen. It was in fact the first country that warned against the war’s terrible consequences. Even after five years, the Islamic Republic keeps telling the warring factions that the only way out of the current deadlock is dialogue and national reconciliation.

The problem is that the US government refuses to stop arming and supporting the Saudis and their allies, let alone supporting such initiatives. It gets worse to hear that president Trump says he has every intention to give a second veto to the Congress bill that demands an end to the US-backed war on Yemen.

Unless this madness stops, some 22 million souls will remain at risk of dying, or being killed. Many civilians will also starve to death or die from medical problems for which they can receive no medicines. The poorest country in the Muslim world is still under blockade, and despite a ceasefire agreement in Hodeida (the only port from which humanitarian aid can get into the country) that is no fully respected by the Saudis and their allies, major humanitarian assistance cannot get into many parts of Yemen yet.

It gets worse. Even if Trump doesn’t veto the Yemen war bill for a second time, US drone attacks and Special Forces operations against the war-torn country will continue apace – just like in Afghanistan. The bill doesn’t prohibit US forces from carrying air and drone attacks against what they claim are Al-Qaeda targets. According to international aid groups, in many cases these ‘precision’ air raids and bombings also kill innocent civilians in populated areas.
Bad news just keeps coming about Yemen and that’s not what its besieged people like to hear right now. After US President Donald Trump’s veto of the War Powers Act demand by Congress to end the illegal Yemen war, a new report from the UN Development Program now says the US-backed, Saudi-led war has set back the poorest country in West Asia more than 26 years.

According to the UN’s new report, the economic losses caused so far are around $88.8 billion, and that’s just assuming the war ends now. If it lasts until 2030, the report estimates losses of $657 billion, and 84 percent of the population chronically malnourished. The report concludes that even with immediate peace, it would take decades just to get Yemen back to the impoverished ex-ante situation.

Of course, this is still good news for the American military-industrial complex – the reason Trump vetoed the War Powers Act by the Congress. More specifically, war profiteers: The five largest US arms makers - Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics - and their dealings with Saudi Arabia worth over $110 billion dollars and counting. By their own account, of all the wars underway from which they are profiting, “none is greater than the Saudi war on Yemen.”

The criminal Saudi air campaign, fueled by the US war profiteers, has hit endless civilian targets, using American smart bombs and missiles, without any protest or complaint from the War Party in Washington. Even though the UN Security Council has appointed a group of experts to detail US-backed Saudi war crimes and egregious attacks on Yemeni civilians, including people attending weddings and funerals, nothing has so far come out of the UN headquarters in New York to suggest that the war and the blockade are coming to a decisive end anytime soon.

This is while the naval blockade of the country by Saudi Arabia and the UAE has also cut humanitarian aid ships docking in the port city of Hodeida. The result: far less food and medicine entering the country, creating a disaster for Yemenis, a deliberate disaster that according to the World Bank, has put “some 8.4 million people on the brink of famine.”

It gets worse. According to a new World Health Organization report, in 2018, there were more than 1.1 million cholera cases in Yemen. At least 2,310 people died from the disease, most of them children.

It goes without saying that as per the Charter of United Nations, wartime economic blockades that starve and sicken civilians and soldiers alike amount to a war crime. The Saudi-Emirati claim that the blockade’s sole purpose is to stanch the flow of Iranian arms to the Ansarullah movement and the revolutionaries has never been substantiated with even a shred of evidence, meaning that there are no Iranian arms in Hodeida. But the US and European arms are flowing to Saudi Arabia unabated. By the standards of international humanitarian law, blockading Yemen’s imports is a disproportionate response and therefore illegal.

True to form, American-supplied weapons have included cluster munitions as well, which pose a particular hazard to civilians because, when dropped from a plane, their devastating bomblets often disperse over enormous areas. These arms continue to flow to Saudi Arabia despite Washington’s denials, while Saudi warplanes rely on US Air Force tankers for mid-air refueling, as the Saudi military receives regular intelligence information and targeting advice from the Pentagon. That is to say that with Trump’s recent veto, such military involvement will only deepen, hence making the US government complicit in Saudi war crimes in Yemen.

One thing is obvious though: The US policy in Yemen won’t achieve its declared goals of defeating Ansarullah and the revolutionaries and re-occupying Yemen. After all, the War Party’s drone strikes began there in 2002 under George W. Bush. Under Obama, as in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, drones became Washington’s weapon of choice. Yet they never managed to change the situation in Washington’s favor.

Likewise, the US-backed Saudi-led war on Yemen will prove not just self-defeating but self-prophetic, as well. The criminal campaign has no justification, legality or moral. That’s why it is cementing an alliance at the United Nations against the Americans, the Saudis and their lackeys. The international community is now more than ever determined and demanding for an end to the illegal war and blockade so that peace and flow of humanitarian aid into the country could begin immediately.  As insisted by Iran, there’s no other way but peace talks and national reconciliation for the Saudi-made and US-backed crisis in Yemen; sooner rather the late.

EA/ME