LAGOS AUGUST 20TH (URHOBOTODAY)-Yemen’s conflict has pushed the country to the brink of famine, with more than 13 million people in need of help, according to the U.N.
Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, doesn’t have enough food to feed its population and aid groups are unable to help areas in need due to the ongoing violence, Ertharin Cousin, head of the United Nations’ World Food Programme, says.
One in five of the country’s population is “food insecure,” and in urgent need of external assistance. Another U.N. official, humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien, who also just returned from Yemen, said the “the scale of human suffering is almost incomprehensible.”
Another report from the U.N. says an average of eight children are being killed or maimed every day since the start of Yemen’s ongoing war. Nearly 400 children have been killed and 600 others wounded.
“Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years,” Peter Maurer, the head of the International Committee for the Red Cross, told the Associated Press during a country visit on Wednesday.
“Yemen has been a mess for years,” Hayes Brown writes in this piece on how the country’s domestic chaos turned into a regional nightmare for the Middle East.
“The clash, which pits what remains of the Yemeni government and its Saudi Arabian supporters against a rebel group known as the How this, has left large parts of Yemen in rubble and the country’s infrastructure shattered,” Brown writes.

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