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Yemen has been in civil war since 2015. Described by Oxfam as one of the world’s “most serious humanitarian crises,” the war has killed more than 12,000 civilians and displaced another four million. Approximately 80% of the country’s population wants emergency assistance, the largest number of all countries in the world. Below are the main facts you want to be aware of, as well as advice on how you can help the Yemeni people.
The war began after the end of the Arab Spring, in which President Ali Abdullah Saleh ceded the force to his deputy, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, in 2011, according to BBC News. Hadi has been dealing with a “variety of problems,” the BBC writes, leading Yemen’s Shiite Muslim minority Zaidi (also known as the Houthis) unwavering to Saleh to expel Hadi from the country in March 2015 and take power.
Since then, neighboring Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states have introduced an air crusade to defeat the Houthis, which has won “logistics and intelligence from the US, UK and France,” the BBC reports. The confrontation intensified further in January 2020 after an alleged missile attack by Houthi insurgents on Yeminí government forces killed 116 people, according to the Guardian.
At the time of writing this article (August 2020), the country is in the grip of this civil war.
Yemen’s fitness infrastructure has been seriously affected by the ongoing conflict. Of the 3,500 medical facilities, only part of it is functioning, leaving “almost 20 million people without access to good physical care,” according to BBC News. As a result, Yemen is vulnerable to the largest cholera epidemic “in epidemiologically recorded history”, its population is malnourished, and now, in most cases, it is facing the coronavirus crisis.
“It’s quite difficult to know the true scope of [COVID-19 in Yemen] because there hasn’t been enough evidence to be meaningful,” Claire Ha-Duong, director of the humanitarian group’s Doctors Without Borders project in Yemen, told CBS News. “The challenge is that in personal hospitals, patients [COVID-19] are rejected and there is very little capacity for other patients in other hospitals.”
In addition to this, devices such as masks, gloves, enthusiasts and other materials to treat coronavirus are lacking, according to UNICEF. The humanitarian charity has sent “more than 33,000 N95 respirators, 33,000 face protectors and 18,000 robes” to frontline staff since early June, but that’s not enough.
In June, foreign donors pledged $1.35 billion in aid at a virtual convention organized through the United Nations, however, as CBS News points out, this is “not enough” for the other people in Yemen, especially since it is “well below the $2.41 billion target, and only a portion of what was harvested last year.
To provide only food to other Yemenis, the United Nations World Food Programme (UNWP) estimates that “more than $700 million is needed until the end of this year to prevent other Yemenis from going hungry,” according to a commander to Bustle.Array
Lately, the organization has been providing emergency food aid to nearly thirteen million more people in the country, which has averted famine, but with “less of the portion of the budget that wants to save children, women and men from hunger,” the Women’s Work Programme. has had to “reduce its emergency food aid for parts of the country at the time Yemen most desires it.”
There are several tactics to help the Yemeni people:
To learn more about charities, fundraisers and resources about the crisis in Yemen, you can set up this map site through the activist @wipbee on Instagram.
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