By Bethan McKernan
Thousands of Yemenis are uploading photos of themselves with one eye closed and using a hand to open the other eye wider to show solidarity with the plight of a toddler who lost her entire family in an air strike on Sana’a last week.
Five-year-old Bouthania al-Rimi’s mother, father and all six of her siblings were killed on 25 August in a Saudi-led coalition strike which hit a residential building in the neighborhood of Faj Attan.
Three families who lived in the targeted three-story house lost loved ones in the overnight attack, which also destroyed several nearby houses. Fourteen people died and 16 were injured in the incident in total, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said.
A picture of Bouthania with facial fractures trying to open her bruised eyes after she was rescued by her uncle was uploaded to Twitter by Yemeni activists, where it was quickly shared thousands of times.
Like the distressing photos of Omran Daqneesh, the boy in the Aleppo ambulance chair, and Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy who washed up on a beach in Turkey after his family drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean, her image has become to many a symbol of the suffering inflicted on children by the Middle East’s many conflicts.
Riyadh and its allies have extensively bombed Houthi revolutionaries in charge of Yemen’s capital and north since March 2015 at the request of the resigned president Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
The campaign has been repeatedly criticized for causing an excessive loss of civilian life. Saudi blockades on Yemen’s ports and airspace have also been blamed for causing the famine now facing seven million people as well as the worst cholera outbreak in modern history, which has infected 500,000 people. More than 10,000 are thought to have been killed as a result of the conflict to date.
In an attempt to draw attention to the dire humanitarian situation, Yemenis are now sharing pictures of themselves opening one eye, like Bouthania, using her name and ‘I speak for Bouthania’ as hashtags.
“Bouthaina is telling the world 'open your eyes',” Istanbul-based documentary maker Abdulrahman Algamily posted.
“Oh my little one, no matter how much you try to open your eyes, the world is, unfortunately, a dark place,” he added.
The Saudi-led military coalition alleged in a statement that the strike which killed Bouthania’s family was the result of a “technical mistake”.
Earlier this week, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and 56 other international non-governmental organizations urged the United Nations to establish an international body to investigate abuses they say may amount to war crimes committed by all the warring parties in Yemen.
Source: The Independent, Edited by Website Team
