Since March 2015, a western-backed, Saudi-led military campaign has devastated Yemen, eroding childhood through bombings, conscription, hunger, and disease. Parents have been taken from their children and children aged prematurely by violence and loss. Streets display pictures of young men framed as martyrs, marking the passage from play to battlefield and death. Hunger and malnutrition hollow children's cheeks, make them vulnerable to preventable diseases, and steal smiles and breath. Surviving bombings often leaves a life of slow torture—no medicine, no food, psychological trauma, and a loss of hope that renders survival indistinguishable from death. Mothers in Gaza and Yemen share equivalent losses.
When the western-backed, Saudi-led military campaign began in March 2015, I started compiling a mental list of all the ways the war was scorching the concept of childhood in Yemen. How war takes parents away from their children, and our children away from us. How war, not time alone, ages our children. On the streets of Sana'a, I come across pictures of young men who once left childhood for adulthood and then life for death, with flowers and the word martyr framing their images.
Those children who weren't conscripted find themselves fighting another war as hunger leaves their cheeks hollow and eyes sunken. This hunger steals smiles from their faces and breath from their lungs. They become too weak to even cry. They walk around malnourished and vulnerable to preventable diseases. What options do those who survive a bombing have when all that remains is slow torture, a life worse than a death?
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