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The war in Yemen, which escalated in March 2015 when a Saudi-led coalition intervened on behalf of Yemen's government against Huthi rebels, has turned a poor country into a humanitarian catastrophe.
Since the beginning of the war in 2015 in Yemen, more than 19,000 raids have been carried out and about 60,000 people have died.
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An investigation conducted by Al Jazeera and released on Monday proves the presence of child soldiers in recruitment camps of the Saudi-UAE-led coalition.
According to data collected by the Yemen Data Project, nearly two-thirds of the Saudi Emirati coalition’s air raids have struck non-military and unknown targets.
The United Nations released a report in June 2018 which shows that a total of 1,316 children were killed in Yemen since the beginning of the war, the report says that 370 children out of a total of 552 were killed in 2017 by air attacks carried out by the coalition. The coalition is also blamed for 300 child injuries.
The UN warned on several occasions that every ten minutes a child dies in the impoverished and now war-torn country from malnutrition, diarrhea or respiratory infections. About two million children don't have access to regular education.
Up to 20 million Yemenis, roughly two-thirds of the country's population, are food insecure.
Saudi Arabia, together with the U.S. and the United Kingdom, among other countries, launched a military campaign on March 2015 in support of Yemen's government. The U.S. backed coalition is aimed to assist Yemen's armed forces in fighting the Houthi rebels.
In 2016, the controversial U.S. involvement in the Yemen war forced them to renege on certain plans to support the coalition.
More recently, the assassination of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul by the security services of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman pushed Western countries to denounce Yemen’s situation.
In Feb. 2019, Amnesty International accused the United Arab Emirates of diverting arms supplied by Western and other states to "unaccountable militias accused of war crimes" in Yemen.
According to a CNN television survey released in 2019, the Saudi-UAE-led coalition has reportedly transferred weapons manufactured in the U.S. to radical Salafist militias and Al Qaeda fighters.
The Republican-led U.S. Senate on March 2019 approved a resolution seeking to end U.S. support for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition in the war in Yemen, in a rebuke of President Donald Trump’s policy toward the kingdom.
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