Yemen’s seven-year-old war would have killed 377,000 people by the end of the year through both direct and indirect impacts, a United Nations agency said in a report published Tuesday. About 60 percent of the deaths would have been due to indirect effects such as lack of safe water, hunger and disease, suggesting that more than 150,000 people may have died directly in the fighting.
The United Nations Development Program report said that the majority of those killed by the indirect effects of the war are “young children who are particularly vulnerable to undernutrition and malnutrition. In 2021, one Yemeni child under the age of five will be dies every nine minutes. Confrontation.” The Saudi-led coalition intervened in early 2015 to sideline the government after Iran-backed Houthi fighters captured the capital, Sanaa.
Since then the fighting has had a “disastrous effect on the development of the country”, the report said. The UNDP has warned in the past that the war in Yemen, already the region’s poorest country, has held back its development by two decades. The Yemen War is often labeled the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster. Estimating the impact of the ongoing fighting in the future, the UNDP warned that a total of 1.3 million people would have been killed by 2030.
“A growing proportion of those deaths will be … because of the second-order effects that the crisis is having on livelihoods, food prices, and the deterioration of basic services like health and education.”
Downfall
The UNDP report said that if the war stopped now, there would be “hope for a brighter future” in Yemen, which could achieve middle-income status by 2050. But it decided that, for now, “the situation continues to spiral downwards”. Escalating fighting, including tank battles and regular bombings by both fighter jets and drones, has destroyed even the most basic infrastructure in some areas.
Fighting has intensified on several fronts in recent weeks, mostly near the strategic city of Marib, the last major stronghold of the internationally recognized government in Yemen’s oil-rich north. Thousands of rebel and pro-government fighters have been killed in city battles.
The UN refugee agency said in separate comments on Tuesday that it is “seriously concerned about the safety and security of civilians in Yemen’s Marib province, which includes more than one million people estimated to be displaced”. “. About 40,000 people have been forced to flee. In Marib since September, said UNHCR spokeswoman Shabia Mantu in Geneva.
“Health conditions such as acute watery diarrhea, malaria and upper respiratory tract infections are common among newly displaced,” she said.
worst disaster
“We haven’t seen as much frustration in Marib in the past two years as we’ve seen in the past two months,” said International Organization for Migration’s Yemen chief of mission, Krista Rottensteiner. The governorate’s 137 displacement sites have seen a nearly ten-fold increase in new arrivals since September, the IOM said in a statement on Wednesday. “We are now seeing, at times, 40 people have no choice but to share a small tent,” Rottensteiner said.
The Houthi this month also seized a large area south of Hodeida, a Red Sea port where the warring sides agreed to a ceasefire in 2018, when loyalist forces withdrew. UNDP administrator Achim Steiner said that “millions of Yemenis are suffering from conflict, trapped in poverty and with little prospect of jobs and livelihood”.
The report said more than 80 percent of the population of about 30 million are in need of humanitarian aid, while “the economy is close to collapsing”. “Yemen is the world’s worst and biggest humanitarian and development disaster, and it continues to worsen.”
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