The Glaring Omissions in Western Coverage of the War on Yemen

The American Conservative:

The Financial Times reports on the enormous humanitarian disaster in Yemen:

“We are displaced people, we depend on aid to provide us with food. We cannot build baths or kitchens and we cannot even buy clean water,” says Mr Bahri, a shepherd in his 50s.

His 11-member family are among millions of Yemenis trapped in a conflict that has triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises: two-thirds of the 28m population face food shortages and lack access to clean water. More than 5,000 civilians have been killed by bullets and bombs. Another 7m are on the brink of famine, according to the UN.

Now a cholera epidemic is raging across the country. The disease has killed more than 2,000 people since April and infected 612,000 others; more than half of the suspected cases are children. It is a man-made catastrophe, UN officials say.

The report does a reasonably good job of conveying the scale and severity of Yemen’s humanitarian crisis, which has become the world’s worst. Millions are starving, hundreds of thousands are contracting preventable diseases, and many millions are displaced by conflict. The gap between the enormity of the crisis and the attention given to it in most media coverage is huge, so every news story about the war has some value. But incomplete reports that don’t tell the entire story leave readers without some of the information they ought to have when trying to make sense of the horror unfolding in Yemen.

Cont....