The coalition of Arab nations led by Saudi Arabia, and armed by Western nations, has for four years bombed civilians in Yemen indiscriminately, creating a humanitarian crisis almost unmatched at present in its scale and bloodletting.
Optimistically dubbed Operation Decisive Storm in 2015 by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman al Saud, who was then the Saudi defense minister, the war has since become a bloody morass.
Faced with 230,000 mostly civilian deaths, 80 percent of the population on food aid, a cholera epidemic, and looming famine, the war looks unwinnable for the outsiders, like “Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam.”
Houthi fighters, despite being massively outgunned by the Saudi-led coalition, are increasingly able to launch strikes deep into Saudi Arabia, even as far as its main oil production facilities.
The coalition, seeing the Houthis as a proxy for Saudi arch-rival Iran, has attempted to reinstall Yemen’s former president, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who was overthrown by the Houthi in 2015.
Saudi-led air strikes have taken an indiscriminate toll, killing not just civilians, but also a freelance journalist working for the U.S. Congress-funded Voice of America news organization.
At the village of Dahyan, locals blame the United States for the carnage, after a bomb apparently made by Lockheed Martin hit a school bus and incinerated 44 Yemeni schoolboys in 2018.
On a wall at the site of the massacre the words are written, “America kills Yemeni children.”
Source: The Guardian (U.K.), Voice of America