In Yemen, hunger causes the death of 50,000 children every year

SANAA - The long Saudi war and the blockade imposed on the Arab country have increased the infant mortality rate in an alarming way. The ongoing Saudi military aggression against Yemen has fueled famine, poverty and disease, claiming the deaths of 50,000 babies each year, many of whom are less than a month old. The Yemeni resistance movement Ansarullah denounces it.

Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a deadly military aggression against Yemen in March 2015 in a bid to reinstate a former Riyadh-backed regime and eliminate the Houthi Ansarullah movement, which has been defending the country alongside the military. The Western-backed offensive, coupled with a naval blockade, destroyed the country's infrastructure, causing the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Children are among the most vulnerable victims of the Saudi war on Yemen, but the issue has never elicited any international response.

In February last year, UN chief Antonio Guterres said tens of thousands of children under the age of five had died of starvation in Yemen since Saudi Arabia and several of its allies launched their aggression. . Last November, the Yemeni Minister of Public Health, Taha al-Mutawakel, announced that every ten minutes a child under the age of five dies of hunger.

Yemen's Health Ministry spokesman Saif al-Hadri criticized the inaction of the international community, saying that none of the major global powers has taken any serious steps to force Saudi Arabia to lift the economic siege and to end the war. Hadri described the situation of Yemen's children as "disastrous", noting that "about five and a half million children under the age of five suffer from malnutrition. Two hundred thousand pregnant women gave birth to malnourished children,” added the spokesman.

Saudi aggression has forced millions of Yemeni civilians to flee their homes, while 24.1 million – more than two-thirds of Yemen's population – are in need of humanitarian assistance, more than 12 million of whom are children. The US-based Armed Conflict and Events Tracking Project, a nonprofit conflict research organization, estimates that the war has claimed more than 91,000 civilian lives. The International Committee of the Red Cross said the Saudi war has forced tens of thousands of people to relocate to Yemen's northern city of Ma'rib, where they find themselves without food, shelter and access to medical care. It must be remembered that behind these horrendous crimes we find the bloodstained hands of an accomplice West.

"The terrorist groups were created by the West, including the United States, and the Israeli regime, which is Washington's closest ally," the leader of Yemen's popular resistance movement, Ansarullah, Abdul-Malik told the -Houthi giving a speech on Friday. "By creating political crises, the evil front has always tried to lead nations away from the path of productivity and progress," he said. "Takfiri terrorist groups, especially Daesh (ISIS), unleashed a campaign of bloodshed and destruction in Syria and neighboring Iraq in 2014 as the United States had no more excuses to extend or expand its presence in the region ".

"Washington and its allies invaded Syria in the same year under the pretext of fighting terrorism (from Daesh), which the Americans and Western allies themselves had created," continued Abdul-Malik al-Houthi. “The so-called US-led military campaign was, however, surprisingly slow to deal with terrorists, despite the sheer size of the coalition that had enlisted dozens of Washington's allies. Numerous reports and regional officials, meanwhile, would point to the role of US in transferring Daesh elements across the region and even airlifting supplies to the terrorist group."