War in Yemen kills every day, but hardly attracts attention

A missile fire at the home of a tribal chief left at least 13 dead, including children, near Marib, Yemen, last Thursday (28). A day earlier, 105 people died in attacks that destroyed 13 military vehicles in the same city. On Tuesday (27), there were 85. On Monday (26), another 105.

Between Monday and Thursday of last week alone, 308 Houthis rebels were killed in Yemen, according to the military coalition led by Saudi Arabia, in what is for the UN (United Nations) the most serious humanitarian crisis in the world.

Of the country’s 30 million people, 21 million are in need of help, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. By way of comparison, it’s as if 149 million Brazilians don’t have the minimum to survive.

Yemen’s civil war, which has lasted nearly seven years, has left more than 10,000 Yemeni children dead or mutilated, according to UNICEF (UN Children’s Fund). Altogether, 11 million children (or four out of every five in the country) are in need of humanitarian aid, 2 million are out of school and 400,000 suffer from severe malnutrition.

But when was the last time you heard about Yemen?

“When you talk about the Middle East, you think of Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq. Yemen is not an important place for religions, it had no diaspora to Brazil, it has no oil, no wealth. The absence of these elements ends up doing so. it’s a less important country, out of people’s mental map,” says Lebanese researcher Danny Zahreddine, professor of international relations at PUC Minas.

Brazil, even so, is somehow present in this conflict. A 2017 UN report found that Taurus, the country’s largest arms manufacturer, sold weapons to the son of a well-known Yemeni arms dealer in 2015, three months after an embargo on such trade. The company stated at the time that it followed the protocols required by Brazilian and international legislation.

On the other hand, there was also the use, by the military coalition led by the Saudis, of Astros II rocket launchers, manufactured in Brazil, which used cluster munitions — internationally banned fragmentation weapons.

The current conflict in Yemen dates back to 2014, when Shiite rebels from the Houthi group rose up and took control of the capital, Sanaa, forcing the resignation of then-President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi in January 2015.

Two months later, a military coalition of Gulf countries, led by Saudi Arabia and with logistical and intelligence support from the United States, began attacking the rebel groups. In September of that year, Hadi reversed his resignation and went on to “govern from exile.”

The Houthis supported the return to power of former dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled the country from 1978 to 2012 — when he was one of the leaders to fall in the Arab Spring. In December 2017, however, Saleh broke with the insurgents and was killed two days later.

Today, Yemen is experiencing a “proxy war”, a proxy war, according to Monique Sochaczewski, a specialist in the Middle East and a professor at the IDP (Brazilian Institute of Education, Development and Research). “It started with a bout of the [príncipe saudita] Mohammed bin Salman, who thought he would solve the problem quickly,” he says. “But the action took much longer than expected and ended up bringing Iran, which supports the Houthis, into the conflict.”

Iran and Saudi Arabia represent opposing groups in the Middle East power game. The so-called Shiite rising — Iranians at the fore, with Iraq and parts of Syria and Lebanon — opposes the interests of the US and Israel; in the Saudi-led bloc are the other Gulf countries and Egypt ruled by Abdul Fatah al-Sisi.

​Brazilian Nathalia Quintiliano, 34, worked for the UN as a monitoring officer for Yemen for four years, between 2016 and 2019. She was based in Djibouti, a small country with less than 1 million inhabitants across the Babelmandebe Strait (Portal of tears, in Arabic), which separates Africa from Asia at the exit of the Red Sea.

At the time, Saudi Arabia had imposed a naval blockade, on the grounds that Yemenis were armed by ships. To resolve the impasse and release humanitarian aid to a country that needs to import 90% of everything it consumes, the UN has pledged to inspect the vessels.

While Quintiliano was there, a female colleague was kidnapped by the Islamic State, and a Lebanese man who worked for the Red Cross was shot dead. In addition to the difficulty of inspecting ships on the high seas in the midst of a war, workers still had to deal with Somali pirates, who operate in the region.

“It’s a very busy area, with piracy, organized crime, trafficking. As it is the only cargo route that leaves part of the Middle East to Europe, a lot of money is spent there,” says Quintiliano. The Brazilian Navy today leads one of the missions that monitor piracy in the same region.

She also highlights the number of Yemenis who worked on the ships in conditions analogous to slavery and the flow of people from Africa who took risks on precarious vessels to cross the strait and try to flee overland to Saudi Arabia.

“It’s very similar to what happens in the Mediterranean, with refugees trying to reach Europe. There is a lot of case of ships that come with everyone.”

Today, the conflict in Yemen has centered on Marib, where last week’s attacks reported by the Saudi coalition took place. The city is one of the last government strongholds that the rebels are trying to take.

Now living in Turkey, Quintiliano says he doesn’t see a quick way out of the conflict. “It’s a totally forgotten war, in a country that was already very poor before everything started,” he says. “This is a much bigger catastrophe than Syria, in humanitarian terms, but one that attracts much less attention.”