Saudi Arabia is bombing and literally starving Yemen to death.
Saudi Arabia tightened its blockade on Yemen after Houthi rebels, who have taken over the national government and its assets, fired a ballistic missile last week toward an airport in Riyadh. The Saudis were able to intercept the projectile, but the event has rattled the region politically. The UN's humanitarian chief has sent a chilling warning that Yemen is facing the world's worst famine in decades in which millions could die, if Saudi Arabia continues to block aid flowing into the war-torn nation. For instance the International Committee of the Red Cross said Tuesday it was unable to get clearance to ship chlorine tablets used to prevent cholera from Saudi Arabia into Yemen, where a massive outbreak of the disease has affected more than 900,000 people. Yemen is in the midst of a civil war between its Saudi-backed Sunni government and an alliance of Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and other fighters loyal to Yemen's previous president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. For the past three years, Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf allies have been trying (so far unsuccessfully) to dislodge the Shiite Houthi rebels from their territory, relying mainly on aerial bombings. More than 20 million people in Yemen need humanitarian assistance and 7 million are facing “famine-like” conditions, aid groups say. The conflict has lead to famine, widespread internal displacement and a cholera epidemic that, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), has exceeded 600,000 cases. Saudi Arabia, supported and armed by the west, has carried out an air campaign against the Houthi rebels since 2015. The Saudi bombing has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of civlians in Yemen, The Saudis, instead of bombing just military targets often bomb civilians in an effort to terrorize the local population. The United States, Canada and Britain have been making more money with arms sales to Saudi Arabia in recent years than ever before, but they are not alone in doing this. More than a dozen European Union nations are selling arms or military equipment to Saudi Arabia, with Britain being followed by France as a top exporter, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The massive weapons sales (estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars) serve two purposes; it arms the Saudi army with the latest state of the art weapon systems the west has to sell, and secondly it effectively buys off the western governments, making sure they will not make a sound while Saudi Arabia continues to bomb and stave civilians in Yemen.
