If there were an Olympics for waging bloody wars, Saudi Arabia and its Arab coalition allies would surely win a medal for their relentless bombing of Yemen over the past year and a half to crush rebels who seized power in 2014.
One international NGO has called the ongoing war in Yemen “arguably the worst humanitarian crisis in the world,” which is saying a lot considering the competition from Syria, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan.
When I first wrote about the Yemen conflict in April 2015, the death toll stood at several hundred, with more than a quarter million people displaced. Today the United Nation’s human rights office estimates that more than 10,000 people have been killed and three million displaced. The World Food Programme reports that seven million people — more than a quarter of Yemen’s population — are “on the brink of famine.”