The Armed Conflict Location Eventa & Data (ACLED) Project released its latest findings on fatalities caused by the war on Yemen, and now that they have completed their assessment of all data from the first year of the war they conclude that more than 90,000 have been killed over the course of the last four years:

BREAKING: #YemenWar Death Toll Exceeds 90,000 According to New @ACLEDINFO Data for 2015

ACLED has now extended #Yemen coverage from the present back through 2015, capturing the full int'l intervention into the country's civil war. Press release here: https://t.co/GluwkQWLSZ pic.twitter.com/A0uPsp9Rh5

— Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (@ACLEDINFO) June 18, 2019

The death toll reported here does not account for preventable deaths caused by starvation and disease. As we know from other studies, even more Yemenis have died from these causes than have been killed by bombs and shells. The overall cost of the war is much higher than the 90,000+ figure reported by ACLED, and this new figure is significantly higher than previous casualty estimates. News stories frequently cited outdated numbers that dramatically understated how many had lost their lives because of the war. For years, the “official” death toll remained frozen at 10,000 years after it six or seven times as many people had been killed. Fortunately, that erroneous information has started to be replaced with more accurate assessments of the losses inflicted by the war.

Two-thirds of the civilian casualties included in this count were killed by Saudi coalition airstrikes:

New data from @ACLEDINFO shows at least 91,600 ppl have been killed in Yemen’s war since 2015. Airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition account for 67% of civilians killed.

— Sune Engel Rasmussen (@SuneEngel) June 18, 2019

As ACLED’s summary states, the Saudi coalition is “the actor most responsible for civilian deaths.” In some parts of Yemen, Saudi coalition responsibility for civilian deaths is even higher than 67%. In those areas that have come under the heaviest and most indiscriminate bombing, the percentage of civilian casualties caused by Saudi coalition airstrikes rises to 75%, and these are the areas that account for most of the total number of civilian casualties for the entire country:

Living in Hodeidah, Taiz, and Sadah governorates has been extremely lethal for civilians. In each governorate more than 2,000 civilians have been killed since 2015 — combined making up more than half of all civilian fatalities reported in Yemen since 2015. More than 75% of the direct civilian fatalities in these governorates are caused by airstrikes from the Saudi-led coalition.

The U.S. shares in the responsibility for causing those thousands of civilian deaths through our government’s ongoing support for the war and the continued selling of U.S.-made weapons to Saudi coalition governments. The Trump administration is determined to continue making the U.S. an accomplice to future Saudi coalition war crimes with the decision to expedite arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.