Crisis in YEMEN: War has devastated this impoverished nation and created a massive humanitarian disaster.

AuthorSmith, Patricia
PositionCover story

One morning last August, a laser-guided bomb dropped by a Saudi Arabian jet struck a school bus in the Yemeni town of Dahyan in the far northwest of the country. The bus had been taking students on a field trip. In an instant, 44 children and 10 adults were obliterated.

Not far from the huge crater marking where the bomb struck lies the graveyard where the victims, most of them younger than 10 years old, are now buried. At each grave, a color portrait of a victim is propped over a coffin-shaped mound of dry, rocky earth.

Even in a nation that has grown hardened to tragedy, the school bus bombing was shocking. But at the same time, it was typical of the toll that war is taking on Yemen's civilians.

Since Saudi Arabia began its military assault on Yemen almost four years ago, the Saudis have bombed weddings and funerals, as well as hospitals, roads, bridges, and factories. The United Nations (U.N.) reported in November that 18,000 civilians have been killed or injured in Yemen as a result of the fighting, almost 11,000 of them from airstrikes alone. The real number is probably much higher, experts say, but verifying casualties in Yemen's remote areas is extremely difficult.

The fighting in Yemen has also created the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Some 14 million people are facing starvation in what the U.N. says could soon become the worst famine the world has seen in 100 years. The aid agency Save the Children estimates that 85,000 Yemeni children have starved to death. Yemen is also experiencing the world's worst modern outbreak of cholera.

"I've heard many say that this is a country on the brink of catastrophe," says David Beasley, director of the United Nations' World Food Program. "This is not a country on the brink of a catastrophe. This is a country that is in a catastrophe."

A Poor, Unstable Country

Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, has long been extremely unstable. It's a tribal society with deep divisions and a long history of internal conflict. To make matters more complicated, for the past 16 years, the United States has regularly carried out drone strikes in Yemen as part of its war against A1 Qaeda and other terrorists operating there. These strikes have killed many terrorists--and also mistakenly struck civilians.

Yemen has been further destabilized by the rise over the past decade of a Shiite rebel group known as the Houthis. In September 2014, the Houthis captured the country's capital, Sanaa, effectively taking control of much of the northern part of the country. The internationally recognized Yemeni government fled south to the port city of Aden.

Saudi Arabia, which borders Yemen, saw Houthi control of Yemen as a threat--in part because the Houthis were getting some assistance from Iran, Saudi Arabia's longtime regional adversary. (Saudi Arabia is a Sunni country, and Iran, like the Houthis, is Shiite; the two branches of Islam have long been at odds.) So in March 2015, Saudi Arabia--leading a coalition of Arab states--launched a full-scale military campaign against the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

"This is a civil war that surrounding countries have jumped into," says Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. The variety of fighting groups is so complex that Alterman calls it "a completely tangled ball of yarn."

Further complicating the situation is U.S. involvement (see "How Is the U.S. Involved?" facing page). The devastating airstrikes are being carried out by the Saudi military but with the help of U.S. intelligence and with American weapons (see chart, below).

'A War on the Economy'

But Saudi Arabia isn't just bombing Yemen. Under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia has imposed international blockades and restrictions on what can be imported into Yemen in order to undercut...

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