KSA’s Aggression on Yemen: Lack of Fuel, Shortage of Water Threaten Millions

Millions of Yemeni families attempting to survive the Saudi aggression on Yemen face danger from another worsening threat: disruption to the water supply in one of the world's driest countries.

Even before the aggression reached its current intensity - as forces from a Saudi-led coalition had held US-backed airstrikes in the north of Yemen - around 13 million people did not have regular supplies of clean drinking water.

Due to the Saudi offensive, now a shortage of fuel needed to pump water from underground aquifers had left a further million people in Aden without drinking water for more than five days, with entire areas of the southern city reported to be cut off.

Fighting since the US-Saudi intervention on 25 March had cost more than 500 lives, but aid agencies working on the ground were warning that the water shortage was now pushing the country to the brink of a wider humanitarian disaster.

Grant Pritchard, Oxfam's acting country director for Yemen, said: "Before the escalation in fighting began almost two weeks ago, there were 13 million people in Yemen with no access to clean drinking water, along with 10 million with insufficient access to food and nine million lacking medical supplies.

"The situation in Yemen is deteriorating by the day. A humanitarian disaster is unfolding. Even before the increase in fighting, Yemen was home to a third of all the people in the Middle East who are in need of humanitarian assistance."

Oxfam points out that the price of diesel, which was needed to power urban water pumps, was rocketing. The fuel had an official subsidy, capping the price at $0.70 a liter, but it was in increasingly short supply, and the black market price was now $2.80.

Experts had been predicting for years that Yemen - the poorest country in the Middle East and one of the driest - could be the first in the world to run out of drinking water.

Despite the pleas from agencies working in Yemen, there was no sign of the fighting abating.

The Saudi-led coalition resumed air strikes after an announcement in Washington in which the US said it was preparing to expedite arms supplies to Saudi Arabia and some of the other members of the coalition in their brutal aggression against Yemen.

Source: The Independent, Edited by website team