Media Silent As US-Backed Saudi Forces Starve Half Million Yemeni Children

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Media Silent As US-Backed Saudi Forces Starve Half Million Yemeni Children

Millions of Yemeni children starving and 'near death' yet, no mercy or respite in sight for Yemen's children.

The United Nations warned that 8,000 children could suffer from severe malnutrition in 2016. And that’s just in one southern Yemeni city.

A woman brings her child to hospital in Yemen to be treated for severe acute malnutrition.

ADEN, Yemen — While the media was flooded with images of the starving children of Syria, the thousands of children suffering from Saudi Arabia’s U.S.-backed onslaught on Yemen made far fewer headlines.

The mainstream media was eager to report on the struggle for survival in Madaya. The mountain town near Syria’s southwestern border was once known as a popular resort destination in the Middle East, but its population is now reportedly being starved under a siege by the Syrian army.

However, the actual situation is far more complex. The U.S.-supported, so-called “moderate” rebels including the Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaida, had first laid siege to the cities of Kefraya and Fua, leading to a retaliatory siege on Madaya by the Assad government. Those same rebel groups were also, in turn, responsible for allowing the starvation in Madaya to continue by occupying the city and keeping humanitarian aid out of reach of the populace as a strategic tactic. Additionally, many images used in media reports on Madaya turned out to be fake or misleading.

Meanwhile, far fewer journalists are covering the large-scale starvation and displacement taking place in Yemen, a situation caused by a bombing campaign and blockade led by Saudi Arabia and its allies and backed by U.S. military aid. The Nusra Front, one of the groups responsible for skyrocketing food prices in Madaya, also has the backing of the Saudi government, like many of the rebel forces in the region.

Saudi Arabia is currently engaged in a proxy war with Iran, who Riyadh blames, inaccurately, for the rise to power of the Houthis in Yemen and setbacks to the kingdom’s agenda in Syria, leading to a bombing campaign and embargo on crucial resources that began in April.

UNICEF reported in October that 537,000 Yemeni children were at risk of severe malnutrition nationwide, while Alexi O’Brien, reporting for Al-Jazeera in September, noted that the United Nations warned that 96,000 children were “starving and close to death” in the port city of al-Hodeidah, and an additional 8,000 children faced starvation in Aden in 2016.

The situation was so dire nationwide that, in June, the U.N. reported “that at least six million people in Yemen are in urgent need of emergency food and life-saving assistance, a new United Nations (UN) investigation has found … 10 out of Yemen’s 22 governorates are facing an ‘emergency level’ food security situation amid the ongoing conflict, including major areas like Aden, Taiz, Saa’da and Al Baida.” In July, Oxfam reported that the number of starving people in Yemen had topped 6 million — nearly half the country’s population of 13 million. Aid workers are struggling to reach the needy, with the World Food Programme reporting that it had served 3.5 million Yemenis by August.

While the suffering of the residents of Madaya is heart-wrenching, some critics have questioned the motives behind the media’s focus on this single town rather than suffering in Yemen or even elsewhere in Syria. Vladimir Safronkov, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the U.N. Security Council, lamented recently that the timing of the reports seemed calculated to undermine the budding peace process in Syria, according to a report from RT. “It looks like that, under the pretext of the deterioration of the situation in besieged cities, attempts are being made to undermine the launch of the inter-Syrian dialogue scheduled for January 25,” he told an emergency meeting of the Security Council on Saturday.

Safronkov said the West practices a “double standard” by raising the alarm about Madaya while ignoring cities besieged by anti-Assad forces:

“Much is being said about Madaya, but not a word about the villages of Nubul and Az-Zahra in the province of Aleppo. And we are talking about the fate of tens of thousands of people.”

On Monday, Ben Norton, politics staff writer for Salon, cited the siege of Yemen, as well as Israel’s decade-long blockade of Gaza, when he questioned why some atrocities are condemned and others are “barely even acknowledged.” He wrote:

“All sieges are of course tragic, because they harm civilians. There should be outrage at the siege on Madaya, but there should be proportionate outrage. All of the other ongoing sieges — and the much larger blockades — that happened to be supported by the West should not conveniently be ignored.

Americans, in particular, should be concerned about the millions upon millions of people being starved in policies backed by their ostensibly democratic government, right at this very moment.”


Watch “It’s not #Madaya. It’s #Yemen … Thank you Saudi regime” from Stop The War On Yemen:

Doctors Without Borders hospital bombed in Yemen

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Doctors Without Borders hospital bombed in Yemen

In this Friday, Oct. 16, 2015, file photo, Christopher Stokes, the general director of the medical charity, Doctors Without Borders, which is also known by its French abbreviation MSF, stands near the charred remains of the organizations' hospital, after it was hit by a U.S. airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan. Stokes says the “extensive, quite precise destruction” of the bombing raid casts doubt on American military assertions that it was a mistake. (Najim Rahim via AP)

NEW YORK - Doctors Without Borders said Tuesday one of its health centres in northern Yemen was bombed overnight by a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia.

The group, known officially as Médecins Sans Frontières or MSF, said the health centre in the Haydan district of Yemen’s Saada province, bordering Saudi Arabia, was targeted with at least two airstrikes at about 11 p.m. Monday. 

About 12 patients and MSF staff members were inside the health centre at the time of the strike and successfully evacuated between the two strikes. One patient was burned and scratched, and another was in critical condition because of the hasty evacuation.

MSF said it had supplied the health centre’s coordinates to the Saudi Arabian coalition, which has been fighting against insurgent Houthi rebels in Yemen for about seven months. The health center is one of few operating medical facilities in Saada.

The bombing incident in Yemen follows the U.S. bombing of an MSF medical facility in Afghanistan, where at least 30 patients and staff members died. MSF has called for the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission, created under the Geneva Conventions, to investigate.

“It is unacceptable that the bombing of a hospital and the killing of staff and patients can be dismissed as collateral damage or brushed aside as a mistake,” MSF International President Dr. Joanne Liu recently said at a press conference. “This was not just an attack on our hospital. It was an attack on the Geneva Conventions. This cannot be tolerated.” The Saudi-led coalition of Arab states launched an air campaign against Houthi rebels and their allies in late March in support of President Abd-Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

Saada is the stronghold of the Iran-backed Houthis who overran the capital unopposed in September 2014, before advancing on several Yemeni provinces.

Air raids have been blamed for scores of civilians casualties since March.

At UN Headquarters in New York, a U.N. spokesman, responding to questions about the raid, said all parties to the conflict in Yemen should avoid civilian casualties.

Blair promised UK support to US in Iraq 1 year before invasion – report

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Blair promised UK support to US in Iraq 1 year before invasion – report

Former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, committed the UK to joining the US invasion of Iraq a year before it began, a newly disclosed White House memo reveals.
The US documents obtained by the Daily Mail and published on Sunday are part of the batch of emails from the private server of former US State Secretary, Hillary Clinton, which US courts have made her disclose.

Among the leaked papers is one written in March 2002 by former US Secretary of State Colin Powell to then-President George W. Bush, where he said: "On Iraq, Blair will be with us should military operations be necessary…He is convinced on two points: the threat is real; and success against Saddam will yield more regional success."

Meanwhile, at the time Blair was quoted by the British media as saying that “this is a matter for considering all the options,” and “we’re not proposing military action at this point in time.”

The document was written a week before the famous meeting between Bush and Blair at the Crawford ranch in Texas, where the latter for the first time signaled his readiness to support military action in Iraq.

In the note titled “Secret …Memorandum for the President,” Powell also said that “the UK will follow our lead in the Middle East.”

According to the document, Blair also was going to provide Bush with “strategic, tactical and public affairs lines that he believes will strengthen global support for our common cause.” It added that Blair has the presentational skills to “make a credible public case on current Iraqi threats to international peace.”

Five months after the meeting at the Crawford ranch, the British government published a dossier on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD), claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and even had a nuclear weapons program. This dossier was one of the reasons for US invasion to Iraq and later all its claims were proved to be false.

The newly disclosed documents also reveal that Blair agreed to act as de facto PR person for Bush and convince skeptical lawmakers and public that Iraq posed a real and imminent threat. He also reportedly suggested “how to… handle calls for UN Security Council blessing.”

In response, Blair wanted the US to treat the UK as an equal partner in a “special relationship” aiming to boost his public support, the new media report said. In one of the documents, Powel wrote Bush that Blair wanted to minimize “the political price” of joining the US in its Iraqi campaign, adding that the PM’s voters “will look for signs that Britain and America are truly equity partners.”

The new revelations sparked a wave of criticism of Tony Blair’s actions among the British politicians.

“The memos prove in explicit terms what many of us have believed all along: Tony Blair effectively agreed to act as a frontman for American foreign policy in advance of any decision by the House of Commons or the British Cabinet,” said former Conservative Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, as quoted by The Daily Mail.

“He was happy to launder Bush’s policy on Iraq and sub-contract British foreign policy to another country without having the remotest ability to have any real influence over it … for George Bush pretending Blair was a player on the world stage to impress voters in the UK,” he added.

Scottish National Party foreign affairs spokesman and the former Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond, said on Sunday that “the evidence against Blair is piling up” and the “net was now closing” around him, eported the Guardian.

“The memo contradicts claims from Mr Blair that all that time he had been seeking diplomatic ways to avoid an invasion. It also adds weight to the evidence given by Sir Christopher Meyer, the former UK ambassador to the United States – to the Chilcot inquiry – that the military timetable and preparation for invasion took precedence over any diplomacy and specifically over the timetable for the weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix,” Salmond said.

"The illegal invasion of Iraq has been unequivocally proven as a fraud and a massive deception by Tony Blair and the then UK Labour government," he said as quoted by the Mail.

READ MORE:Chilcot to apportion Iraq blame far beyond Tony Blair’s inner circle

At the same time, Blair’s spokesperson claimed that the content of the newly revealed documents corresponds with both the former prime minister’s public statements at that time and to what he told the Chilcot inquiry investigating the circumstances of the 2003 Iraq invasion. However, Blair previously repeatedly denied that he was planning military action in Iraq before the invasion.

In 2010, Blair told the inquiry that, before the invasion, he said that the UK would only join the US “in confronting and dealing with this threat” referring to Iraq.

"I think what he took from that was exactly what he should have taken, which was if it came to military action because there was no way of dealing with this diplomatically, we would be with him," Blair told the investigation.

The newly disclosed documents could potentially lead to calls for reopening the inquiry into the circumstances of the Iraq invasion, although the chair of the investigation, Sir John Chilcot has recently announced that he was ready to publish a final report. At the same time, he continues to avoid announcing an exact publication date.

READ MORE: 2003-2011: Half million Iraqis died in war, occupation

Last month, Chilcot said he would consult with Prime Minister David Cameron in order to set a timetable for publication.

In the meantime, relatives of British soldiers that lost their lives in Iraq threaten to file a legal complaint if the report is not published by December, BBC reports.

The UK participated in the US-led coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003 without a UN mandate on the premise that they would find WMD, although such weapons were never discovered there. The invasion and subsequent occupation claimed the lives of more than half million Iraqis only between 2003 and 2011 and cost the UK lives of 179 British soldiers.

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