With The World Distracted, Yemenis Die From U.S. Bombs

The U.S. government has condemned Putin’s war in Ukraine, but it has kept quiet while Yemenis die in a war we sustain with weapons.

In recent months, the war in Yemen saw a major burst of violence, featuring dramatic increases in military attacks, battlefield deaths, and civilian suffering, most of it receiving little attention in the United States.

As the world’s attention has focused on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Yemen Data Project has documented a large spike in air raids in Yemen, marking one of the largest escalations in the war over the past several years.

“Currently, we’re in a state of escalatory military action,” Timothy Lenderking, the U.S. Special Envoy for Yemen, said in a public address early last month.

As the war intensified, it faded from public view, even as the suffering of the Yemeni people worsened. In one of the greatest blows to public oversight, the U.N. Human Rights Council ended the mandate of a U.N. expert panel on Yemen, which had been documenting human rights violations in the country.

“This is a time to increase, not abandon, attention to Yemenis trapped in war zones,” Kathy Kelly wrote in The Progressive.