’Don’t Bury Me’: Dying Boy’s Words in Yemen War
Local Editor
"Don’t bury me": A plea by a six-year-old boy, Fareed Shawky, brings Yemen’s forgotten war back into focus.
It is the war the world forgot, activists say, and little Fareed is reminding us.
"Don’t bury me," six-year-old Fareed says again through tears in a plea documented in a video, which contains distressing images.
One of the medical staff laughs as he pats Fareed’s small legs to comfort him.
The interaction was filmed just this month in October by Ahmed Basha, a local photographer who recounted the story to CNN.
"I thought he was just injured," Basha says from his home in Taiz, Yemen’s third-largest city. "I wasn’t even sure I had been recording when he said this. I was more concerned with my still photography."
Days later, Fareed died of wounds to his head. The boy was buried, hurriedly, in a family graveyard.
He is just a child. But more than six months of war in his country, Yemen, had taught him the bitter realities of conflict. People die, then they are buried.
When Basha got word of the child’s death, he published the video of the boy begging to live and began telling the world his story.
It was quickly picked up by social media at a time when little else on Yemen’s war seems to gain much attention.
A Saudi-led coalition backed by the United States has been launching a military aggression on Yemen by carrying out airstrikes against the country since March 26. The airstrikes have not been authorized by the United Nations [UN].
