Aisha Jumaan condemns the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led war on Yemen for starving millions of Yemenis:

Saudi Arabia must lift the blockade and allow the commercial flow of ships and airlines into Yemen unhindered. The United Nations and countries of the Western world, especially the U.S. and the U.K. that provide logistical and intelligence support in the Saudi war on Yemen, must demand a lifting of the blockade. If this cannot be done, no amount of aid in the world can save a nation of 27 million people from famine.

Most Americans would be horrified at the thought that American policy may be a direct cause of starvation for millions of innocent people.

I hope most Americans would be horrified by this. One of the ongoing difficulties in changing the U.S. policy of support for this war is that relatively few Americans seem to know that there is such a policy, and even fewer know what effects the war is having on the civilian population. Fewer still consider stopping this policy a priority, and so far there aren’t enough members of Congress among them to demand an end to support for the war.

One reason for this is the failure to give the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen the attention that it deserves, and another is the failure to show the connection between U.S. and coalition policies and the disaster unfolding on the ground. When the war on Yemen is covered in Western media, it is often presented simply as a regional proxy war and/or as a sectarian conflict. Both are misleading and inaccurate in important respects, and both minimize or ignore the role of the U.S. in enabling and backing one side of the war.

Americans still seem to be largely unaware of the role their government has had in wrecking and starving Yemen for over two years, but Yemenis are keenly aware that they are attacked with U.S.-made weapons dropped from planes sold by the U.S. to our client regimes and refueled by our military. They know how destructive the blockade has been to their country, but even reasonably well-informed Americans could manage to read quite a few reports about the war and never see any mention of it. One of the worst humanitarian crises of the current century is unfolding in Yemen, and it is entirely man-made and caused in large part by U.S.-backed governments with Washington’s blessing. We should be horrified by the terrible toll this is taking on the people of Yemen, and we should also be alarmed that our government can be complicit in such a horror while facing so little opposition at home.