News Release

Yemen: Carnage from Saudi Bombing “Not the Worst Part”

Share

AP reports: “A massive airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition targeting rebels hit a local marketplace in Yemen, killing over 45 civilians on Monday, security officials and eyewitnesses said.”

Glenn Greenwald writes in the piece “Today’s Civilian Victims In Yemen Will Be Ignored Because U.S. And Its Allies Are Responsible“: “Because these deaths of innocents are at the hands of the U.S. government and its despotic allies, it is very predictable how they will be covered in the U.S. None of the victims will be profiled in American media; it’ll be very surprising if any of their names are even mentioned. … All of that stands in the starkest contrast to the intense victim focus whenever an American or Westerner is killed by an individual Muslim. Indeed, Americans just spent the last week inundated with melodramatic ‘warnings’ from the U.S. government — mindlessly amplified as always by their media — that they faced serious terror on their most sacred day from ISIS monsters: a ‘threat’ that, as usual, proved to be nonexistent.”

Recently, WikiLeaks released “The Saudi Cables” — over half a million cables and other documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry. Also, see Arabian Peninsula twitter feed.

MATTHIEU AIKINS, [in NYC], matt.aikins at gmail.com, @mattaikins
Just back from Yemen, Aikins wrote a new piece in Rolling Stone: “Watch a Dispatch from the Scene of Saudi Arabia’s War Crimes in Yemen.” He recently won the Overseas Press Club Award for best magazine reporting.

FAREA AL-MUSLIMI, falmuslimi at gmail.com, @almuslimi
Currently in Beirut, Al-Muslimi is a Yemeni writer and a visiting scholar with Carnegie Middle East. He was recently profiled in Foreign Policy: “Departing Washington. Next Stop: Reality.”

He said today: “Best estimates are that about 3,000 people have been killed since the start of the Saudi bombing campaign. About one million displaced. You have more children now fighting than are in school.

“The bombings are horrible enough, but what’s worse now is that more people are probably dying because of the blockade and food shortages. And all sides of the conflict are responsible for this.

“The Saudi bombings have taken out bridges — why do that? About 100,000 Yemenis each year would go to Egypt for medical care. Now the Egyptian government (a Saudi ally) has for the first time since 1967 been enforcing visas on Yemenis — in effect blocking Yemenis from going for medicine. And critically, most airports in the country are damaged.

“It used to be that there was some food in the market but most people didn’t have cash, now even if you have cash, there’s no food to buy.

“There needs to be a real ceasefire now. Otherwise, there won’t be a Yemen. It’s a country with 25 million people and 68 million guns even before the Saudi bombing campaign.”

Rasha Mohamed, a researcher at Amnesty International, has been tweeting about the effects of cluster munitions in Yemen. See from CNN: “Report: Saudi Arabia used U.S.-supplied cluster bombs in Yemen.”

Background: Al-Muslimi appeared on past IPA news releases including “Iraq: Is Yemen the Model?” and has testified on Capitol Hill about U.S. drones bombing campaign in Yemen.