By Shane Dixon Kavanaugh
More than a dozen civilians are being killed or injured by bomb blasts and other explosions every day of Yemen’s war, on average, according to new figures compiled by an international monitoring group.
Airstrikes, tank shells and other explosive devices killed or maimed at least 7,917 people in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest nation, between January 1, 2015 and February 1, 2016, according to statistics compiled by Action on Armed Violence, a London-based organization that tracks incidents, deaths and injuries caused by such weapons. Civilians accounted for more than 6,400 of those casualties, or roughly 82 percent.
Those figures mean that every day in Yemen, almost 17 civilians have been killed or injured by warring factions since January 2015. Daily casualties for armed fighters was less than four. Action on Armed Violence said it also found that explosions killed or injured more civilians in Yemen than anywhere else in the world last year, even despite all the other conflict in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Civilians continue to bear the brunt of attacks in Yemen. Warplanes led by Saudi Arabia bombed a busy market north of Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, on Saturday, killing at least 30 people, according to news reports. At least 22 of those victims were civilians, said witnesses and security officials, who described scenes of charred bodies strewn across the area.
Throughout the conflict, Saudi-led warplanes, often armed with U.S. and U.K.-manufactured weapons, have bombed markets, hospitals, homes and refugee camps, according to witnesses and humanitarian groups....
Nearly 3,000 civilians-including some 700 children-have now been killed during the fighting, the vast majority by Arab coalition airstrikes, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said earlier this month. The seemingly indiscriminate attacks by the coalition have intensified calls for an international arms embargo on Saudi Arabia.
European Union lawmakers last week voted on a resolution calling on EU nations to halt the sale of weapons to the oil-rich kingdom over its airstrikes in Yemen as well as a Saudi-led naval blockade imposed on the country aid groups say has curbed the flow of food and medical supplies.
Saudi Arabia imported nearly $10 billion in new missiles, aircraft and other high-end weapons between 2011 and 2015, nearly all of them from the U.S. and Europe, according to a recent Vocativ analysis. That’s a 275 percent increase from the previous five years, and makes the wealthy kingdom the world’s second-largest arms importer behind India.
