by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
By Ahmet Gurhan Kartal,
London: Turkish and international aid to Yemen is “very critical” to at least protect the country from famine, a representative from Save the Children said Friday.
The group’s Yemen head, Tamer Kirolos, said he thinks help from all countries should continue to increase as the situation gets worse.
Kirolos told Anadolu Agency 85,000 children is estimated to have died in Yemen since the beginning of the crisis there because of a lack of access to basic needs such as food, health services and medicine.
He said the number of children who have died in bombings and shelling is also in the tens of thousands.
“The most important thing is children are dying and the situation is not getting any better,” he said. “And that is a concern to us because obviously that figure will rise.”
More than 8 million children are without adequate health care in Yemen, according to the Save the Children.
Kirolos said 22 million were in need of aid and 11 million “critically” in need of help last year.
He told a group of reporters in London, what’s happening in Yemen is already “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world but somehow it is getting worse and worse.”
It is estimated the number of people who will be in need of humanitarian aid will rise to 24 million in 2019, according to Kirolos and 12 million be will in need of food delivery daily.
Kirolos hopes Stockholm talks will end in agreement and the situation for Yemeni people can improve.
Yemen has been wracked by violence since 2014 when the Shia Houthi group overran much of the country. The crisis escalated in 2015 when the Saudi-led coalition launched a devastating air campaign aimed at rolling back Houthi gains.
Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies accuse the Houthis of acting as a proxy force for Shia Iran.
Turkey is among the biggest donors sending humanitarian aid to the crisis-stricken country.
Tens of thousands of people, including civilians, are believed to have been killed and the UN estimates 14 million Yemenis are at risk of famine.
—AA
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Washington : Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners have transferred American-made weapons to Al Qaeda-linked fighters, Salafi militias and other factions waging war in Yemen, in violation of their agreements with the US, according to a CNN report.
The weapons have also made their way into the hands of Iranian-backed rebels battling the coalition for control of Yemen, exposing some of America’s sensitive military technology to Tehran and potentially endangering the lives of US troops in other conflict zones, the report based on an investigation said on Tuesday.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), its main partner in the war, have used the US-manufactured weapons as a form of currency to buy the loyalties of militias or tribes, bolster chosen armed actors, and influence the complex political landscape, according to local commanders on the ground and analysts who spoke to CNN.
By handing off this military equipment to third parties, the Saudi-led coalition is breaking the terms of its arms sales with the US, according to the Department of Defence.
In response to the CNN report, a US defence official confirmed that there was an ongoing investigation into the issue.
Previous CNN investigations had established that US-made weapons were used in a series of deadly Saudi coalition attacks that killed dozens of civilians, many of them children.
The Abu Abbas brigade, a militia group linked to the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), possesses US-made Oshkosh armoured vehicles, which they had paraded in a 2015 show of force through the city.
Abu Abbas, the founder, was declared a terrorist by the US in 2017, but the group still enjoys support from the Saudi coalition and was absorbed into the coalition-supported 35th Brigade of the Yemeni Army.
In 2015, Riyadh launched the coalition to oust Iranian-supported Houthi rebels from Yemen’s capital city of Sanaa and reinstate the internationally recognised government of President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi.
The war split the country in two, and with it came the weapons — guns, anti-tank missiles, armoured vehicles, heat-seeking lasers and artillery, CNN said in the report.
Since then, some of America’s military equipment has been passed on, sold, stolen or abandoned in Yemen.
Arms markets are illegal in Yemen, but they still operate openly in the mountainous city of Hodeidah located in the country’s southwest.
To one side hang veils, abayas and colourful dresses for sale; to the other are pistols, hand grenades, and US assault rifles available on special order, according to the report.
The US is by far the biggest supplier of arms to both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and its support is crucial to the Saudi-led coalition’s continuing war in Yemen.
US lawmakers are trying to pass a resolution ending the Trump administration’s support for the coalition.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Sana : An estimated 85,000 children under the age of five may have died from acute malnutrition in three years of war in Yemen, a leading charity has said.
They suffered immensely as their vital organ functions slowed down and eventually stopped. Their immune systems were so weak they were more prone to infections with some too frail to even cry, Save the Children’s Yemen Director Tamer Kirolos said.
“For every child killed by bombs and bullets, dozens are starving to death and it’s entirely preventable. Parents witness their children waste away, unable to do anything,” the BBC quoted Kirolos as saying.
He warned that an estimated 150,000 children’s lives were endangered in Hudaydah with “a dramatic increase” in air strikes over the city in the last few weeks.
Save the Children said it based its figures on mortality rates for untreated cases of Severe Acute Malnutrition in under-fives from data compiled by the UN.
According to conservative estimates, it calculated that around 84,700 children may have died between April 2015 and October 2018, the BBC reported.
The charity said that based on historical studies, if acute malnutrition was left untreated, around 20-30 per cent of children would die each year.
Rising food prices and the falling value of the country’s currency as a result of a civil war are putting more families at risk of food insecurity, the UK-based charity said.
It also blamed a Saudi-led coalition’s imposed blockade for putting an increasing number at risk of famine, with continued heavy fighting around the principal lifeline port of Hudaydah further exacerbating the situation.
It is difficult to get an exact number of deaths, as many go unreported, aid workers in Yemen said. Only half of the country’s health facilities are functioning and many people are too poor to access the ones that remain open.
Trying to revive talks to end the three-year war which has caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the UN warned in October that up to 14 million Yemenis are on the brink of famine, the BBC report added.
The fighting that escalated in 2015 after the Saudi-led coalition launched an air campaign against the Houthi rebel movement had forced President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi to flee abroad.
At least 6,800 civilians have been killed and 10,700 injured in the war, according to the UN, while 22 million people have been left in need of humanitarian aid, as it created the largest ever food security emergency leading to a cholera outbreak that affected 1.2 million people.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Moscow : President of the Union of Museums of Russia Mikhail Piotrovsky, who is also the director of the State Hermitage Museum, confirmed that his country will work hard via the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on banning trading in Yemeni smuggled antiques, and resending them to Yemen.
In a meeting here on Monday with Yemen’s Ambassador to Russia Dr. Ahmad al-Wahishi, Piotrovsky was briefed on damages hit Yemeni historical and antique monuments as the greatest witness on catastrophic situations left by Houthi militia’s war. Al-Wahishi pointed out that the Yemeni manuscripts, antiques and antiquities, which have been looted and smuggled, date back to thousands of years.
Piotrovsky, who also chairs the Russian-Yemeni Friendship Society, made it clear that many committees in the UNESCO’s International Museum Council’s meetings suggested banning selling smuggled antiquities from heritage-rich countries and trading in them in international markets. He reviewed activities to be organized by the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg on the 90th anniversary of the Russian-Yemeni Friendship.
—AB/UNA-OIC
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Cairo: The Saudi-led coalition said Tuesday it will respond to a UN report that suggested war crimes may have been committed in war-torn Yemen.
The coalition “will take an appropriate stance on the report after a legal review of it,” the coalition said in a statement.
UN experts earlier Tuesday said that individuals in the Yemeni government and coalition forces conducted attacks in Yemen that may amount to war crimes.
“The Group of Experts have reasonable grounds to believe that individuals in the Government of Yemen and the coalition may have conducted attacks in violation of the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution that may amount to war crimes,” said the 41-page report issued by the UN experts, which was mandated by UN Human Rights Council.
Yemen has been wracked by conflict since 2014 when Shia Houthi rebels overran much of the country.
The conflict escalated one year later when Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a wide-ranging military campaign aimed at rolling back Houthi gains in Yemen.
Riyadh accuses the rebel group of serving as a proxy force for Shia Iran, Saudi Arabia’s arch-foe in the region.
The coalition airstrikes, according to the report, caused “most direct civilian casualties after hitting residential areas, markets, funerals, weddings, detention facilities, civilian boats, and medical facilities.”
Some 6,660 civilians were killed and 10,563 injured in the Yemeni conflict since March 2015, the UN Human Rights Office said and warned that the real figures are likely to be “significantly higher.”
The report also highlighted the crimes of Houthi forces, including killing of civilians and child recruitment.
—AA
