Aid Groups Urge US to Halt All Military Support for Coalition in Yemen

Local Editor

Five international aid groups on Monday urged the United States government to halt all military support for a Saudi Arabia-UAE-led war in Yemen, saying this will save millions of lives.

A joint statement by the International Rescue Committee, Oxfam America, CARE US, Save the Children, and the Norwegian Refugee Council said that 14 million people are at risk of starving to death in Yemen if the parties to the conflict do not change course immediately.

The warring sides have undermined Yemen's economy with policies and practices that have caused rampant inflation while the value of currency plummets, it added.

"Starvation must not be used as a weapon of war against Yemeni civilians," the statement said.

The statement added, "All warring parties, and those fueling the conflict through arms transfers, are implicated in this totally man-made humanitarian crisis".

The charities called the US to back up its recent call for a cessation of hostilities in Yemen with genuine diplomatic pressure, mainly on Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

A Saudi-UAE military coalition, backed by the US, launched a massive air campaign against Yemen in 2015 aimed at forcefully reinstalling former Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi's resigned regime.

Since then, data collected by the Yemen Data Project has found that more than 18,000 air raids have been carried out in Yemen, with almost one-third of all bombing missions striking non-military sites.

Weddings, funerals, schools and hospitals, as well as water and electricity plants, have been hit, causing the martyrdom and wounding thousands.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the war, and according to Save the Children, as many as 85,000 children under five "may have died from extreme hunger" or disease since 2015.

If it doesn't cease its military support for the coalition, "the United States, too, will bear responsibility for what may be the largest famine in decades," the charities said.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team