By David Williams
Her face horribly burned and body pitted with shrapnel, Eman’s hands have had to be tethered to prevent her from scratching at her sickening wounds.
The one-year-old’s eyes are closed, one is badly bruised while a tube and monitors are dotted round her broken, bandaged body as she lays in the emergency ward of a hospital in Yemen’s capital Sana’a. Her stomach has been punctured by flying debris.
In a bed across the ward, one-year-old Zuhoor, her eyes puffed and red from bruising and right arm in plaster is an equally shocking sight, lying in a yellow top dotted with cartoon characters and her own blood.
Both children were among the innocent victims of an airstrike by warplanes of the Saudi-led coalition which struck a house north of Sana’a where a crowd of mourners had gathered on Wednesday night.
Seven women, among them Eman’s mother, and a child are said to have died in what was being described as the ‘latest outrage’ of the coalition’s controversial bombing campaign.
Dozens were reported to have been injured, including Eman and Zuhoor, as residents in the village of Ashira pulled them from the wreckage of collapsed buildings.
The airstrike hit the house of a local tribal leader where mourners were gathering to offer condolences after the death of a well-known local woman.
‘People heard the sound of planes and started running from the house but then the bombs hit the house directly,’ a resident of Ashira said, ‘The roof collapsed. Blood was everywhere.’
Pictures published by local media showed tribesmen searching through the rubble of a destroyed house said to belong to Mohammed al-Nakaya, a tribal leader allied with Yemen's Houthi movement.
Some dug bodies and survivors from the rubble with their bare hands. One man cradled the body of a dying woman as he knelt in the dust. Grant Pritchard, Deputy Country Director for Yemen of the British-based charity Save the Children, called the attack ‘horrific.’
He said : 'We’ve heard at least one child was killed, and our teams have just visited a hospital where they saw two infants who had been seriously injured, including a one-year-old girl with shrapnel wounds to her stomach and burns right across her face.
‘The little girl’s aunt told us her mother had been killed in the attack and there are still two children missing in the rubble.
‘Attacks like this have been carried out by all sides with impunity for nearly two years, and all too often it is children and their families that are paying the price.
‘Nearly 1,500 children have been killed and thousands maimed. The bombs are landing on homes, they are landing on schools, and they are landing on hospitals. These are crimes, pure and simple. It is unforgivable.’
It was unclear whether the house was targeted because of the tribal leader’s links to the Houthi revolutionaries but a spokesman for the coalition said it was looking into reports that Yemeni civilians had been killed in an air raid.
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In October the alliance of mainly Gulf Arab states was heavily criticized after launching an air strike on a funeral gathering in Sana'a that killed 140 people, according to one U.N. estimate.
The death toll from that strike was one of the highest in any single incident since the alliance began military operations in March 2015 to try to restore the administration of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
The White House said at the time it might consider cutting its support to the Saudi-led campaign which has been providing air support for Hadi's forces in a civil war that has killed more than 10,000 people and displaced millions.
The alliance blamed the October funeral attack on incorrect information it said it received from the Yemeni military that armed Houthi leaders were in the area.
Britain has faced strong criticism after weapons and munitions sold to Saudi Arabia were found to have been used in coalition airstrikes.
There have also been claims that UK military advisors have been working with the coalition, helping to plan the strikes – allegations denied. Aid workers warn that children like Eman and Zuhoor are being the brunt of the crisis in Yemen that has seen two million displaced.
Save the Children’s Ruairidh Villar said: ‘British aid is keeping children alive in Yemen right now. We’ve managed to reach three quarters of a million children in the last two years – though programs like malnutrition clinics for starving babies, psychological care for children left traumatized by war, and support for maternity units.
'That’s children so malnourished they don’t have the energy to cry and their bones are jutting out. Or children maimed by bombs who wake in the night screaming. It’s horrific.
‘But we’re operating in a war zone and the odds are stacked against us – right now our doctors are telling us for every child who reaches care there are 10 to 15 who don’t. There are more than two million acutely malnourished children in Yemen, of which nearly half a million are at the most extreme end of the scale and close to death.
Hospitals have been attacked. In one of the maternity units we support in Sana’a the glass has been blown out of the windows, and its incubators are held together with sellotape.’
Source: Daily Mail, Edited by Website Team
