Media silent as Saudi warplanes massacre 109 civilians in Yemen during Christmas.
A Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen has killed 109 civilians in air strikes in the past 10 days, including 54 at a crowded market and 14 members of one family in a farm, the top U.N. official in the country said on Thursday. U.N. resident coordinator Jamie McGoldrick called the fighting futile and absurd, an unusually direct criticism of the war in which Saudi Arabia, backed and armed by the United States, Britain and others, is fighting the Iran-allied Houthi armed movement. Citing initial reports from the U.N. human rights office, a statement by McGoldrick said air strikes hit a crowded market in Al Hayma sub-district of Attazziah in Taiz governorate on Tuesday, killing 54 and injuring 32. Eight of the dead and six of the injured were children, according to the reports. On the same day an air strike on a farm in Attohayta district of Hodeidah governorate killed 14, and air strikes elsewhere killed a further 41 civilians and injured 43 over the past 10 days. Saudi Arabia, supported and armed by the west, has carried out an air campaign against the Houthi rebels since 2015. The United Nations has no up-to-date estimate of the death toll in Yemen, having said in August 2016 that according to medical centers at least 10,000 people had been killed. 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.
