Yemen: 4 years of war on
children
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| Yemenis dig graves for children after their schoolbus was hit during an airstrike (AFP) |
Save the Children is the largest Aid Organisation in Yemen,
attempting to help save the 14 million people at risk of famine, and the 2
million children risking exploitation and abuse in what is being described as
“the World’s worst humanitarian crisis”.
By Francesca Merlo
As of Tuesday, March 26th, the war in Yemen will
have been raging on for four years. In that time, there have been over 19,000
air raids: more than one every two hours.
1.5 million children have been forced to flee the bombing of
their cities, their villages and their homes.
A war on children
Save the Children, who has been working in Yemen for over 50
years reports that these air raids have been led by a Saudi-led coalition,
including - amongst others - western countries such as the United States and
the United Kingdom. Save the Children has confirmed that these bombs are the
main cause of death amongst children. Their figures state that 55 out of 1000
children die before reaching their 5th birthday and they have
one plea: “Please help us stop the war on children”.
A triple threat
14 million Yemeni people are at risk of starvation. 10
million children do not have access to adequate sanitation. Save the children
is calling what the children in Yemen are facing every day a “triple threat”:
bombs, starvation and disease. With schools and hospitals being either
inexistent or inaccessible due to the destruction of infrastructures, the level
of malnutrition and other preventable illnesses in Yemen is sky-high, and
fatal. The aid organisation states that “more than one hundred boys and girls
are dying from extreme hunger every single day while at least one child dies
every ten minutes as a result of preventable killers such as cholera.”
The main cause of death
Of those who are accounted for, the bombs have killed or
injured almost 7,000 children since the escalation of this war. In the last
year, of all the children who have been killed, 50% of them died because of
bombing from the sky. Often, these children were struck when in their own
homes, and often when they were travelling, attempting to flee the area, to
find safety elsewhere. On other occasions, the children were simply living
their lives, as was the case in August 2018, when a bomb struck a school bus –
killing 40 children who returning to school from a picnic.
Unimaginable fear
Tamer Kirolos, Director of Save the Children, says “One
cannot even remotely imagine the terror [the children] must feel when a bomb
falls on their house, nor the severity of the physical and mental wounds that
all this leaves on them, indelibly. What is happening in Yemen should shock the
world and must end immediately … no child should suffer the unspeakable cruelty
that is perpetrated in Yemen every day”.
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