(Photo: AP)
The young mother stepped onto the scale for the doctor. Even with all her black robes on, she weighed only 84 pounds — 38 kilograms. Umm Mizrah is pregnant, but starving herself to feed her children.
And her sacrifice may not be enough to save them.
The doctor’s office is covered with dozens of pictures of emaciated babies who have come through Al-Sadaqa Hospital in Aden, casualties of a three-year war in Yemen that has left millions of people on the edge of famine.
Mothers like Umm Mizrah are often the only defense against the hunger that has killed thousands. They skip meals, they sleep to escape the gnawing in their stomachs. They hide bony faces and emaciated bodies in voluminous black abaya robes and veils.
The doctor asked the mother to get back on the scale holding her son, Mizrah. At 17 months, he was 5.8 kilograms (12.8 pounds) — around half the normal weight for his age.
He showed all the signs of “severe acute malnutrition,” the most dire stage of hunger. His legs and feet were swollen, he wasn’t getting enough protein. When the doctor pressed a finger into the skin of his feet, the indentation lingered.
Around 2.9 million women and children are acutely malnourished; another 400,000 children are fighting for their lives, in the same condition as Mizrah.
Nearly a third of Yemen’s population — 8.4 million of its 29 million people — rely completely on food aid or else they would starve. That number grew by a quarter over the past year.
Aid agencies warn that parts of Yemen could soon start to see widespread death from famine. More and more people are reliant on aid that is already failing to reach people. The war, now three years old, drags on interminably between Yemen’s Shiite Houthi rebels who hold the country’s north, and the Saudi-led coalition, armed and backed by the United States. which has sought to bomb the rebels into submission with a relentless air campaign in support of the Yemeni government.
It is unknown how many have died, since authorities are not able to track cases. Save the Children late last year estimated that 50,000 children may have died in 2017 of extreme hunger or disease, given that up to 30 percent of children with untreated cases of severe acute malnutrition die.
The AP’s reporting on the war in Yemen is supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
“Unfortunately, now Yemen is considered to be the world’s largest humanitarian emergency,” said Stephen Anderson, the Yemen director of the World Food Program. Some 18 million people do not know where their next meal is coming from.
Even before the war, the Arab world’s poorest nation struggled to feed itself. It is a country of deserts and mountains with dwindling water resources where only 2 to 4 percent of the land is cultivated, so almost all of its food and supplies must be imported.
The war has shattered everything that kept Yemen just above starvation. Coalition warplanes blasted hospitals, schools, farms, factories, bridges and roads.
The coalition has also clamped a land-sea-and-air embargo on Houthi-controlled areas, including the Red Sea port of Hodeida, once the entry point of 70 percent of Yemen’s imports. Now far less gets in as coalition ships off shore allow through only UN-inspected and approved commercial ships and aid, often with delays.
The United States gives significant backing to the coalition campaign, providing intelligence and billions of dollars-worth of munitions as well logistical help like air-to-air refueling of coalition warplanes. The US State Department says Washington has provided nearly $854 million to address the humanitarian situation in Yemen.
In many places there is food in the markets, but people simply can’t afford it, since salaries are going unpaid, work is harder to find and the currency has collapsed in value.
Umm Mizrah and her husband, who have three young daughters in addition to Mizrah, usually eat one meal a day, often just bread and tea. The Associated Press is identifying her by the nickname she often goes by — meaning “mother of Mizrah” — to protect her privacy.
When the doctor in Aden told her malnutrition can be fatal, she trembled. The parents felt helpless. Cigarette burns were visible on the baby’s belly. Desperate, the father had turned to a Yemeni folk cure called “maysam,” or “branding” — using burns to expel evil spirits.
“I don’t know what is right,” she said quietly. “He was playful and doing fine then he started to get sick and stopped breastfeeding and playing.”
The AP travelled across southern Yemen, territory held by the coalition-backed government, and visited several districts among the 107 areas nationwide that the U.N. warns are most likely to fall into outright famine.