Two-thirds of Yemenis were already what the UN called “food insecure” before the Houthis advanced south, but in the nearly three years since then, Yemen and the wider Middle East have plunged into dangerous instability. Never known as an international tourist draw, the country has recently made headlines for outbreaks of cholera and diphtheria—and ballistic missiles that travel hundreds of miles toward the Saudi capital of Riyadh. With the war on isis slowing down in Syria and Iraq, Yemen is now the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. [...]
“Yemen more closely resembles a region of mini-states at varying degrees of war with one another, and beset by a complex range of internal politics and conflicts, than a single state engaged in a binary conflict,” wrote Peter Salisbury, a researcher with the London-based Chatham House policy institute, in a December report on the country. [...]
Alliances with al-Qaeda and other shady actors are everyday business inside Yemen, but the war has only complicated things, said Elisabeth Kendall, a senior research fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Oxford University’s Pembroke College. She’s made multiple trips to Yemen over the years, most recently in August. “Al-Qaeda now don’t hold territory, but they have made strong alliances with tribes,” she said, particularly in the al-Bayda highlands north of Aden, near Houthi forces. “They’re fighting the same mutual enemy—the Houthis—and they’re feeling embattled on various fronts in the home territories against the Houthis. Why would you not hook up with a bunch of guys with guns just because they’re waving black flags?” [...]
Nearly a third of the Saudi-led coalition airstrikes have hit what local observers at the Yemen Data Project, an independent group that collects information on the war, call “non-military” targets. That category includes marketplaces, water and electricity sites, food storage, hospitals, medical centers, mosques and all those kind of things, Craig said. “Less than 45 percent of Yemen’s medical facilities are now operating because of the conflict. People can’t, a lot of the time, afford to get there.” Since the war began in March 2015, Saudi aircraft have bombed water and electrical infrastructure more than 100 times. Beyond that, “there have been 68 air raids that have targeted medical facilities; 183 that have targeted marketplaces,” Craig said.
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