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Yemen

How Yemeni Immigrant Activists In NYC Are Changing A Whole Community’s Mindset

Riyadh Alhirdi is trying not to cry. He’s sitting in the Yemeni American Merchants Association’s (YAMA) new offices in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, explaining the convoluted process of procuring asylum for his wife and five children. Alhirdi, who is 43-year-old and was born in Yemen, has been dealing with opaque immigration procedures regarding his family for over four years. They have been stuck in Egypt since 2015 because the American Consulate in war-torn Yemen is closed. Although he talks on video chats with them daily, over the past eight years, he has been with his family only once.

American Woman Turns To Hunger Strike To Break Media Blackout On Yemen

SAN FRANCISCO — In Yemen, 18 million civilians are now at the brink of starvation, including 5 million children. The situation in the country, widely considered to be the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, is entirely man-made – the sordid result of the Saudi Arabia/UAE coalition’s war to control the Middle East’s poorest nation, a war that deliberately targets civilian infrastructure and the civilian food and water supply. Despite the fact that these are clear war crimes, and despite the mass suffering it has inflicted on Yemen’s innocents, this effort continues to receive U.S. and U.K. support. In the face of the enormity of this completely preventable crisis, some international activists have taken matters into their own hands...

‘Brutally Honest’: Public Outcry Forces Facebook To Stop Banning Pics Of Starving Yemeni Girl

A backlash prompted Facebook to stop removing posts featuring a photo of an emaciated seven-year-old Yemeni girl, which accompanied a harrowing New York Times report from the war-torn country. The atrocities in Yemen don’t make poignant headlines in Western mainstream media as often as stories about chemical weapons in Syria or ‘Russian meddling,’ as the conflict usually gets sidelined in the press, but there are notable exceptions. ‘The Tragedy of Saudi Arabia’s War’ was the title of a grim report published by the NYT on Friday. An image of a starved child named Amal Hussain was chosen by the journalists to illustrate the horrible death toll and suffering inflicted on the small Arab nation of Yemen by the armed intervention of its Saudi neighbor.

The Royal Touch: How Saudi Money Keeps Washington At War In Yemen

It was May 2017. The Saudis were growing increasingly nervous. For more than two years they had been relying heavily on U.S. military support and bombs to defeat Houthi rebels in Yemen. Now, the Senate was considering a bipartisan resolution to cut off military aid and halt a big sale of American-made bombs to Saudi Arabia. Fortunately for them, despite mounting evidence that the U.S.-backed, supplied, and fueled air campaign in Yemen was targeting civilians, the Saudi government turned out to have just the weapon needed to keep those bombs and other kinds of aid coming their way: an army of lobbyists. That year, their forces in Washington included members of more than two dozen lobbying and public relations firms.

In Yemen And Beyond, U.S. Arms Manufacturers Are Abetting Crimes Against Humanity

Our leading weapons dealers have developed a business model that feeds on war, terrorism, chaos, political instability, and human rights violations. The Saudi bombing of a school bus in Yemen on August 9, 2018 killed 44 children and wounded many more. The attack struck a nerve in the U.S., confronting the American public with the wanton brutality of the Saudi-led war on Yemen. When CNN revealed that the bomb used in the airstrike was made by U.S. weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, the horror of the atrocity hit even closer to home for many Americans. But the killing and maiming of civilians with U.S.-made weapons in war zones around the world is an all too regular occurrence. U.S. forces are directly responsible for largely uncounted civilian casualties in all America’s wars, and the United States is also the world’s leading arms exporter.

A School Bus Is Blocking A Boeing Entrance In St. Charles to Protest Yemen Airstrike

The use of U.S.-made bombs in the ongoing conflict in Yemen brought activists in a painted school bus to a Boeing facility just outside St. Louis this morning — and the protesters came not with demands, but with a message for the people of Yemen.  "The action was done in solidarity with the people of Yemen as they are murdered by Saudi Arabia using weapons supplied by Boeing and other weapons manufacturers," the activists said in a statement posted to the Facebook page of the Earth Defense Coalition. According to a coalition representative on the scene, police have already arrested one activist, Phillip Flag, who had locked his arms to the rear axle of the bus. A second activist, Ashton Howell, is apparently still inside the bus. "Given the air strikes in Yemen against children on a school bus...

What You Need To Know About Yemen

We speak with Medea Benjamin, who has traveled to and written about US conflicts in the Middle East, about the war on Yemen, the origins, the extent of US involvement and how it connects to other conflicts. Yemen is a current center of failed US foreign policy. We also discuss what we can do about it, as well as Labor Day and current news. For an in-depth discussion on the tenth anniversary of the financial crisis of why the banks got bailed out and why we didn't, plus what we can do differently next time, subscribe to Clearing the FOG on Patreon and receive our bonus show, Thinking it Through. Visit Patreon.com/ClearingtheFOG.

Peace Activists Block Boeing Weapons Facility With Bus To Protest War On Yemen

Peace activists in St. Charles, Missouri blocked the entrance to a weapons facility run by the arms manufacturer Boeing on Monday, August 27, in protest of the joint US-Saudi war on Yemen. The anti-war demonstrators barricaded the street with a bus, on which they wrote “Boeing gains from Yemen’s pain.” They used a bus as a symbol of Saudi Arabia’s August 9 bombing of a school bus in Yemen, in which at least 40 children and 11 adults were killed and another 79 civilians were wounded with a US-made bomb. The Earth Defense Coalition said in a press release that the “action was done in solidarity with the people of Yemen as they are murdered by Saudi Arabia using weapons supplied by Boeing and other weapons manufacturers.”

UN Accuses Saudi-led Coalition Of Possible War Crimes In Yemen

Air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen's war have caused heavy civilian casualties at marketplaces, weddings and on fishing boats, some of which may amount to war crimes, United Nations human rights experts said Tuesday. Saudi Arabia is leading a Western-backed alliance of Sunni Muslim Arab states trying to restore the internationally recognized government of Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, ousted from the capital Sanaa by the Iran-aligned Houthis in 2015. Fighters of the Houthi movement have fired missiles into Saudi Arabia, blocked delivery of supplies to Taiz and shelled the strategic city from the highlands, the panel said. They have also committed torture, a war crime, it said. Coalition forces have imposed severe restrictions on Red Sea ports and Sanaa airport...

Saudi Leader To Keep Bombing Children So Yemen Fears Saudi Arabia For Generations

NEW YORK — On Monday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Yemen, Lise Grande, called for an “independent and impartial investigation” into the Saudi Arabia-led coalition’s attacks on Yemeni civilians. Grande stated that “what is happening in Yemen is unimaginable” and added that “the time has come to wake up to the terrible reality of the war and its human cost and the need to work together to end hostilities.” Grande cited last week’s attacks on a family home and later on a civilian vehicle fleeing fighting near the city of Dreihimi. Those two airstrikes, separated by a matter of hours, killed over 30 civilians, at least 24 of whom were children, some as young as three years old. Despite the international outcry from UN officials and other public figures, the concern over the coalition’s extensive targeting of civilians is unlikely to influence Saudi Arabia’s actions.

Saudi Economic War Triggers Yemen Currency Collapse And Worsens Plight Of War-Torn Nation

SANAA, YEMEN — More than three years of U.S.-Saudi-led coalition war against Yemen has already created the world’s largest food security emergency. With millions of people currently facing starvation, the UN has described Yemen as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. Last week, panic entered Yemeni local markets and houses after a plunge in the value of the Yemeni Riyal (YR) accompanied by increasing prices for basic foodstuffs. Those who still have money rushed to convert their savings to USD or buy gold, but most Yemenis now face two grim prospects: either to die by U.S.-Saudi airstrikes or to die of hunger. The YR has lost more than half of its value relative to the U.S. dollar — the owners of exchange shops and citizens in Sana’a and Aden told MintPress that the exchange rate of the YR against one dollar amounted to about 550 YR compared to 250 YR at the beginning of the war in the country.

How The Media Keeps Americans In The Dark About The Slaughter In Yemen

A somewhat grainy video, presumably shot from a decade old cell phone, shows more than two dozen load Yemeni kids, aged 6 to 15, playing, laughing, and excitedly moving about their school bus, invoking warm childhood memories for anyone who has ever caught a bus to and from a school outing. Moments later every single one of these kids were killed, vaporized by a Saudi fired missile. This atrocity took place on 9 August, leaving 51 dead, 40 of whom were children, with most victims under the age of 10, while another 77 were seriously injured, according to the International Red Cross. The US Department of Defense has tried to downplay the United States role in what must surely constitute a war crime and/or a crime against humanity by either arguing it’s still investigating the matter or by disingenuously minimizing its involvement.

I Don’t Remember Voting For US Bombs To Kill Little Kids In Yemen

It must have been a moment of unspeakable shock, terror and pain. But it’s hard to know exactly what it was like at the moment last Thursday when a school bus packed with Yemeni schoolchildren — summer campers coming back from a picnic — was struck from the skies by a powerful bomb, because so few of these innocent kids survived to tell about it, and because those who did are mostly clinging to life, maimed or badly burned by the blast. Instead, we can only gape at pictures of a twisted metal frame that hardly resembles the bus that was once filled with happy, singing children...

Mourning And Anger At Funeral Of Yemeni Children Killed In US-Saudi School Bus Attack

SADAA, YEMEN — Tens of thousands of Yemenis took to the streets of Sadaa, northern Yemen, to hold a funeral procession for the children who were killed on August 10 by U.S.-backed Saudi airstrikes in Dhahian city next to a crowded market. The deadly attack came while they were on a picnic to Dhahian’s outskirts after graduating from summer school. The mourners, who came from across the country, walked in a long convoy next to vehicles that carried the bodies of more than 30 children, as participants carried pictures of the attack and chanted slogans against Saudi Arabia and the United States. “America Kills Yemeni Children,” read several banners. A source in Yemen’s Health Ministry, based in Sana`a, said in a statement that 51 people were killed in the raids, including 40 children.

U.S. Is Complicit In Child Slaughter In Yemen

On August 9, a U.S.-supported Saudi airstrike bombed a bus carrying schoolchildren in Sa’ada, a city in northern Yemen. The New York Times reported that the students were on a recreational trip. According to the Sa’ada health department, the attack killed at least forty-three people. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, at least twenty-nine of those killed were children under the age of fifteen, and forty-eight people were wounded, including thirty children. CNN aired horrifying, heartbreaking footage of children who survived the attack being treated in an emergency room. One of the children, carrying his UNICEF issued blue backpack, is covered with blood and badly burned. Commenting on the tragedy, CNN’s senior correspondent Nima Elbagir emphasized that she had seen unaired video which was even worse than what the CNN segment showed.