SOPHIE MCNEILL: Ten
children killed and more than twenty injured when Saudi warplanes bombed their
school. Casualties in a Middle East war you probably haven’t heard of…
JAMIE MCGOLDRICK : “Yemen is the forgotten,
abandoned emergency and it suits a lot of countries”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Where civilians are deliberately
targeted, child soldiers die fighting on the front lines and babies starve.
FRANCESCO SEGONI: “This is a catastrophe, this is
a real humanitarian crisis”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Tonight on Foreign Correspondent,
Yemen – The War on Children
[TITLES]
Sana’a, Yemen
The War on Children
Reporter: Sophie McNeill
SOPHIE MCNEILL: You have to be either extremely
brave or perhaps ignorant of history to pick a fight with the people of Yemen.
Yemenis have a long and proud warrior tradition. In a rite of passage, small
boys receive a prized Jambiya dagger. Teenagers get machine guns.
CROWD CHANTING: “Death to America. Death to
Israel. Damn the Jews. Victory for Islam!”
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Civil wars have wracked Yemen for
decades, but since March last year, fighters from the Zaidi minority rebel
group known as the Houthis, have ruled these streets, in the Capital Sana’a, as
well as large parts of the rest of the country.
LEADER ON STAGE: [to crowd] “We’re not scared of
death. We are martyrs”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Yemen is now gripped by a civil
war between several factions. The main struggle is between the Houthis and the
president they deposed last year. Now exiled, he is supported by a group of
Arab states, led by Yemen’s powerful neighbour, Saudi Arabia.
The net result? Seventeen months of relentless
Saudi Coalition air attacks and ground fighting, killing a total more than 6.500
people here in the Middle East’s poorest nation. With the Saudi’s imposing a
blockade, it’s not an easy place to get into, but after weeks of trying we
finally make it in. What we witness is the unfolding tragedy of a city under
siege.
[hospital corridor] “A tour of Sana’a’s busy
hospitals reveals the true cost of this war on civilians – particularly kids”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Eight year old Faris was asleep in
his home north of Sana’a when a missile hit his house. He’s struggling to make
sense of what his life has become.
FARIS: “When I leave…”.
GRANDAD: “What will you do?”
FARIS: “Go out and play”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: The eight year old’s mum and
brother were killed in the attack.
GRANDAD: “When you leave you will go out and play
with other kids. And go for a walk”.
FARIS: “Will I live?”
GRANDAD: “Huh?”
FARIS: “Will I live?”
GRANDAD: “Of course you’ll live, if God allows.
God will heal you”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Faris has severe burns, stomach
injuries and a badly fractured leg. His dressings need to be regularly changed.
FARIS: [crying] “Please doctor, don’t! Please
doctor, don’t! It burns! You’re hurting me, you’re hurting me. For god’s sake,
for god’s sake!”
SOPHIE MCNEILL: “This is just so horrific to watch
and to know that Faris has to do this every second day and that this is going
to continue for months on end as the doctors here try and heal him”.
Down the hall we find ten year old Murad and his
family from Saad’a, a northern city heavily bombed and shelled by the Saudi
Coalition. Two weeks ago, he and his cousins were playing near their home and
they found a shiny object in the grass.
MURAD: “The bomb. I picked it up while I was
playing and it exploded and I got injured”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: It was a cluster bomb. Human
Rights Watch has documented numerous cases of the Saudi Coalition dropping
these widely banned munitions in Yemen. Murad now has shrapnel embedded in his
brain and his nine year old cousin, Abdurazag was killed.
MURAD’S UNCLE: [showing picture to Sophie on
phone] “He died in hospital. He was injured in both of his thighs. He was fully
paralysed. He had a deep injury to his stomach”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Murad’s brain surgery will cost
the family hundreds of dollars, which they just don’t have. They’re going to
stay in Sana’a to wait and see if anyone can help them.
There is a fierce propaganda war being waged here.
During our visit, the Houthis attempt to tightly control what we see and
highlight the cost of the Saudi attacks. But even without their encouragement,
in nearly every neighbourhood in Sana’a, you can find evidence of the alleged
war crimes committed by the Saudi Coalition.
JAMIE MCGOLDRICK: [United Nations, Yemen] It’s
been statistically shown, up to fifty per cent of all the casualties have been
civilians. The hospitals, the schools, public buildings have not been spared in
this war and that’s been the tragedy. I think, it’s been one of the hallmarks
of this crisis”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: It was fear over the Houthi’s ties
to Shia Iran that triggered the Saudis to intervene in their neighbour’s civil
war. The Saudi’s war is backed by US and UK military advisers who assist in
selecting targets to bomb, but the UN has accused the Coalition of deliberately
attacking civilian homes and striking military targets in densely populated
areas - such as this air raid on a Houthi missile storage facility in a Sana’a
suburb.
HISHAM AL-OMEISY: “The shock blew out windows
almost four kilometres from here, the aftershock, and the rubble just landed
everywhere, crushing cars, crushing buses”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Hisham Al-Omeisy is a political
analyst who lives in Sana’a.
HISHAM AL-OMEISY: [political analyst] “The attack
actually happened in the morning, while everybody’s on the streets, the kids
are playing in the streets. I was actually having coffee right next to my
window and I suddenly saw this huge ball of fire. I was in total disbelief just
standing there. Then the pressure wave came in and it just knocked out my
window right in my face and it knocked me down. The problem with the Saudis is
that they don’t really care if the military camp is in a residential area, if
their target is a neighbourhood that is full of people”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: The Saudi attacks appear to have
only increased local support for the Houthi’s.
HISHAM AL-OMEISY: “They thought people would be
driven by fear and surrender. What they ended up doing, is really ticking off
people and now they are really mad and they’re seeking vengeance. I was very
vocal anti-Houthi at the beginning of the war, but when the bombs started
landing next door with utter disregard for my life, for my family’s, for my
kids, I had to side with the Houthi’s”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: We visit Sana’a during a lull in
the air attacks, while peace talks are underway in Kuwait. But people here know
that this could change at any moment.
HISHAM AL-OMEISY: “It’s not the airstrike’s we
fear as much as anticipation – waiting in fear of the airstrike actually
happening. It’s very traumatic for kids. My kids for instance now, I lock the
door hard enough and they flinch, thinking it’s a bomb. My son is six year’s
old, but he is so traumatised by the war and it’s going to take years for him
to recover from that”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Constantly living in fear is just
one part of the suffering in Yemen. There’s just not enough food or medicine
here. The Saudis and their Coalition allies impose an air and sea blockade. The
economy has collapsed and the streets of Sana’a are now filled with beggars.
The Coalition bombed Yemen’s main port a few months ago. Catastrophic for a
country that imports 90% of its food.
MAN YELLING: [scramble by crowd for food handout]
“One by one. Please! One by one”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Desperate parents have gathered to
see if their names are on a local NGO list for handouts of flour and oil.
[standing outside gate] “It is just mayhem here at
this food distribution in Sana’a. The UN says that since the war began, food
prices have gone up 60% here in Yemen, that means that 14 million people are
food insecure – which basically means they’re hungry and they don’t know where
their next meal is going to come from”.
MAN TAKING FOOD: “Lack of food is the hardest
part. We have to grab it wherever we can”.
WOMAN: “I gave my number to this guy so I’m going
to take my share now”.
CHILD: “Here’s mine. Here’s mine”.
WOMAN [CHECK]: “My turn, my turn”.
MAN: “Piss off! Who’s this? Is this you? Go go!
Yes go ahead”.
WOMAN: “I want to sign my name up. What’s the
problem here? My husband’s injured and I want you to sign up my name and help
me. I have nobody to help me but God”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Outside the capital, millions of
Yemenis have been forced from their homes. Just a few hours north of Sana’a the
situation is desperate. We’re on our way to one of the many camps for displaced
people. These families here receive hardly any aid. They depend on the medical
charity, Medecins Sans Frontieres – MSF – which runs a mobile clinic here twice
a week.
“Since the war began last March, 2.8 million
people have been displaced inside Yemen itself. Now here at this camp there’s a
1,000 people living and there’s no food distribution for the people here.
Everyone is just struggling to survive and to feed their children”.
In this war aid workers are given no guarantee of
protection. In the past year alone, four MSF supported hospitals have been
targeted, leaving dozens of staff and patients killed or wounded. Such are the
dangers that since our visit, MSF has been forced to evacuate international
staff from hospitals near here.
FRANCESCO SEGONI: [Medecins Sans Frontieres] “This
is a catastrophe, this is a real humanitarian crisis. They don’t have just
enough food, not near enough food. And I mean as they are more vulnerable at
this age, we see a lot of malnutrition among the kids. About 20% of the
children we see are diagnosed as malnourished, half of them severely so”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: This is where 14 month old Mazen
has been living for the past year. His grandma tells us that his breastfeeding
mother died two months ago from an illness. They don’t know what.
GRANDMA: “What should we do? We are doing our best
for him. Usually he eats our food. A piece of bread with tea. It depends how
much money we have in our pocket for milk. But if we don’t have enough money
for the milk we can’t help him. Only God can do that”.
JAMIE MCGOLDRICK: “One in three of every under
five children in this country is severely malnourished, so that’s 1.3 million
people. We’re in a very difficult position in Yemen because it’s a very small
country. It’s a country that people can easily forget and I think that’s what’s
happening globally because it’s forgotten. If you look at it in the context of
the Middle East, you’ve got competing with you know the Palestine’s, competing
with the new crisis of the Syria’s and the Iraq’s and where there’s just maybe
more geo political interests than in Yemen”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: The most malnourished children
from all round the north of Yemen come here to Al Sabheen Hospital in Sana’a.
Today the malnutrition ward is packed full and there’s no money for more staff
or to open any extra beds. Seventeen month old Eissa is severely malnourished
and close to death.
EISSA’S FATHER: “For about ten months – diarrhoea,
bloated stomach and a mouth infection. We’ve been trying to cure him but it’s
not working. We’ve been here for ten days. Of course, we can take care of him
the best we can. We don’t sleep day and night worrying about him. What else can
we do? My wife feels devastated and stays up all night crying. She’s exhausted
from looking after him”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Doctors say Eissa is now in a coma
and he needs to be in the intensive care unit, but to get into the ICU here,
you have to pay and Eissa’s family just doesn’t have the money.
DOCTOR: “Can pay money here in the UCI, can get
Eissa inside here or cannot. If cannot, sit in the emergency room”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: “So if they can’t pay, they can’t
come in here”.
DOCTOR: “Cannot pay, cannot accept the case here”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Little Emtiaz is two but is so
acutely malnourished, she weighs as much as some newborns. A chest infection
has now left her gasping for breath. Her grandma says all they’ve had at home
recently is tea and bread.
GRANDMA: “There’s no money”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Emtiaz is in desperate need of a
ventilator which they don’t have here in emergency.
OTHER WOMAN: “How come you can’t do anything for
her? Don’t you have pity?”
NURSE: “Hey, Mohammad. Talk to the doctor to get
her to the ICU!”
MOHAMAD: “We want to take her to the ICU but the
grandmother doesn’t have money”.
NURSE: “I don’t know why there is a problem. Why
don’t you have her transferred to the ICU?
MOHAMAD: “Yesterday they gave that order”.
GRANDMA: “Her grandfather has gone to look for
money”.
NURSE: “They have no money. So we’re going to get
the manager to grant them an exemption”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: It’s incredibly difficult for the
staff here, with no funds and hardly any resources, deciding who lives and who
dies.
[nurse and doctor arguing in hallway] “I have to
transfer the case”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: After much debate, the doctors
tell us an exemption has been granted for Eissa and he will be moved into
intensive care as soon as there’s room. An exemption is also granted for the
little girl Emtiaz, but her grandma is then told there’s no more functioning
ventilators available in the ICU.
NURSE: “I cannot accept this case in the Intensive
Care Unit because there are only two machines for two patients inside. I cannot
take from the patients to do this. What can I do? This is a big problem here in
Yemen”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Al Sabheen used to have six more
ventilators for children.
DOCTOR: [counting the ventilators] “One, two,
three, four, five, six”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: “None of them work?”
DOCTOR: “Yeah, not work”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: “You don’t have the funds or the
parts”.
DOCTOR: “No”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: The Saudi blockade is crippling
Yemen’s health system. The lives of more than 4,000 kidney dialysis patients
were at risk due to a lack of supplies. Medecins Sans Frontieres stepped in
promising to airfreight critically needed drugs and equipment for the next six
months. But even they can’t guarantee a steady supply of fuel for hospital
generators.
[in hallway] “The electricity has just gone off at
this hospital which means all these dialysis machines have stopped and the
nurses are now frantically trying to restart them again”.
The power kicks back in, the immediate crisis
averted for these patients. Others aren’t so lucky. The UN has since announced
that 40,000 cancer patients in Yemen will no longer receive medication because
there just isn’t the money to buy the drugs.
JAMIE MCGOLDRICK: “The medicines are so severely
priced, it is way beyond people’s ways and means. There are many people dying
here, silent deaths. They’re dying deaths of preventable diseases that never
should happen”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: We’re heading out of Sana’a again,
travelling south with Osama al Fakih, one of Yemen’s leading human rights
researchers at the NGO Mwatana. You have to be careful on these roads. Adding
to the chaos and suffering, the spectre of Al Qaeda and Islamic State – both
groups are exploiting the civil war to seize ground in the south and east. The
frontier of Al Qaeda territory is about 20 kilometres from here.
We’re on our way to visit the scene of one of the
worst alleged war crimes Osama and his colleagues have investigated, where last
October Saudi Coalition war planes transformed a wedding into a mass funeral.
OSAMA AL FAKIH: [in car] “And that number of
casualties is forty civilians were killed and forty two were injured”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Mohammad Jamal and his family were
celebrating a wedding. Three of his cousins were all getting married on the
same day. It was mid evening and the wedding was in full swing.
MOHAMMAD JAMAL: “During the night, after dinner,
we heard the planes as usual”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: But then suddenly, an air strike
hit.
MOHAMMAD JAMAL: “I went to this house to try and
save the women inside and the war plane was still hovering overhead. Everyone
who was around trying to help got scared and ran away thinking they’d drop
another missile. A lot of people died here. The kids who were playing here in
this yard died too”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Mohammad’s five year old daughter,
Jood, had been playing with her cousins.
MOHAMMAD JAMAL: “After the hit we were looking for
her – me and her mother, in all the surrounding houses. We thought she might
have run away. We still had hope she was alive. But on the second day our
friends who came to help found her hair ribbon”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: That was all they could recognise
of their daughter, a hair ribbon. In all of the forty people killed here that
night, eighteen were members of Mohammad’s family.
MOHAMMAD JAMAL: “Since this incident we feel like
we’re living in a nightmare. We still can’t believe the loss. Our life became
empty with no hope. We lost all happiness in life. As for the countries who are
helping Saudi Arabia to strike Yemen, they share the same responsibility. They
are criminals as well. We won’t forget them for this.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: It’s not just the Saudi Coalition
which stands accused of war crimes in Yemen. The United Nations says the
Houthi’s hide troops and weapons in heavily populated areas. They’ve also been
accused of deliberately firing artillery into civilian areas controlled by
other factions in this war.
OSAMA AL FAKIH: [Human Rights Researcher] “These
incidents must be documented and the voices of victims must be heard. Houthis
have been accused of indiscriminately shelling populated areas which led to
also hundreds of civilians killed and injured”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: Back in Sana’a at the hospital,
finally some good news. Murad, the boy injured by a cluster bomb, is going to
be helped. MSF will pay for the cost of his brain surgery to remove the
shrapnel.
MURAD’S FATHER: “They surgery is very crucial for
him to survive because the shrapnel has gone inside the skull very close to his
brain. It has to be removed. If God allows we’re hoping the surgery will be
successful”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: And what of Eissa and Emtiaz? The
babies suffering horrific malnutrition? Doctors tell us Emtiaz was left brain
damaged as a result of being so malnourished. Her family took her out of the
hospital and back to their village. We don’t know if she’s still alive.
We went looking for Eissa as well but he wasn’t
there. He’d died just hours after finally being admitted into the ICU. His
family had already buried him in an unmarked grave. They didn’t have enough
money for a gravestone.
[at funeral of young boy with open coffin] All
across this country, Yemenis are burying their children. Sixteen year old Osama
was killed by a sniper yesterday. He was fighting on the front line. [men
dancing at funeral] Approximately 30% of those fighting for the Houthis are
believed to be child soldiers.
CHILD SOLDIER: “I’m just a fighter in the name of
God, among many fighters who defend us against Saudi and American attacks on
our country. I never get scared. The victory is with us who have God on our
side”.
HISHAM AL-OMEISY: “You’re playing with people’s
psyches when death is all around. It is okay for kids to pick up a gun and
fight. They’ve been dancing, they’ve been singing some songs which is kind of
sad. The death of a child shouldn’t be celebrated, but it’s become so normal
now. It is a coping mechanism but it shouldn’t be a means to an end, the end
being it’s okay, death is okay. That is very disturbing”.
CROWD CHANT: “God is great! Death to America and
Israel! Victory to Islam!”
BOY’S FATHER: “This is our chant, that we always
repeat in Yemen”.
CROWD CHANT: “We don’t be defeated! We won’t be
defeated!”
SOPHIE MCNEILL: The dead boy’s father says he’s
willing to send his other two sons to go and fight as well.
BOY’S FATHER: “If somebody invaded your country
would you surrender? If your homes, kids and country were destroyed and under siege
for years, would you be silent? Why is the whole world watching the persecution
of Yemenis in silence?”
SOPHIE MCNEILL: People here claim Al Qaeda and
Islamic State flourish in areas outside Houthi control. They see their fight as
one against Sunni extremism.
BOY’S FATHER: “What would you do if ISIS fighters
came to your country? We’re being asked to surrender ourselves to ISIS! They’re
asking us to just surrender our weapons”.
SOPHIE MCNEILL: A few days after we flew out of
Sana’a, peace talks broke down. Saudi Coalition warplanes began to pound the
capital again and targets all over the north of the country. A school was hit,
a hospital, a chip factory. Hundreds more civilians killed, many of them
children. Each death it seems deepening the hatred and the resolve for revenge.
HISHAM AL-OMEISY: “They’ve been galvanised. I mean
you see death all around you and they think death is inevitable, I’m going to
die here anyway - air strikes or whatever, might as well pick up my gun and
fight and kill one of the guys of the enemies”.