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All right, you guys, introducing Will Porter.
He is a blogger and he's already kind of a journalist.
He's going to be a real one someday.
He blogs at themarketradical.wordpress.com and at notbeinggoverned.com and I run his articles at antiwar.com and at the Libertarian Institute as well.
This one's at the Libertarian Institute.
We ran it on antiwar.com too.
It's called Yemen's Silent Numbers.
Official death count masks war's toll on civilians.
Welcome to the show.
How you doing, Will?
I'm good, Scott.
Thank you for having me on, man.
Good to talk to you, dude.
So listen, I'm really glad that you wrote this piece.
I've been wondering a lot about this.
We've been hearing the same numbers for a long time straight when you and I know that it must be a lot worse than that.
But of course, and I know you listen to the show and you know the journalist Nasser Arabi that I'm talking to all the time, reporting from Sana'a, Yemen, who has much higher numbers than the UN, who has said on the show that he confronted one of the UN representatives with his higher numbers and that the UN representative told him, oh yeah, no, I don't dispute that.
I'm just saying this is all I can prove myself by this and that.
So I think you maybe were curious about the same thing.
What all can we know about the casualties in at least the latest iteration of the war in Yemen beginning March 2015?
Yeah, so as you said, nobody really knows how many people are getting killed in the Saudi coalition's air campaign right now and bombings and shellings and stuff.
And there are some human rights groups in Yemen that have sort of limited access to the country, but none of them are really doing comprehensive civilian casualty counting.
And right now the only agency that's really attempting to do that is the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the OHCHR.
And right now that agency's, their tally right now is just under 14,000 casualties.
And they break that down into like 5,100 dead and about 8,700 wounded.
But there are some problems with this figure that kind of break down in three ways, I think.
And so the first thing is simply the fact that the OHCHR has not put out new figures.
It hasn't updated its data in over three months.
And so you have daily bombings and shellings going on in Yemen.
And so three and a half months worth of shellings is probably a lot of civilians that are being left out of that toll.
And so the first issue is simply the frequency with which the OHCHR actually updates its figures.
Well, let me stop you right there for a second because I mean, five down, I mean, that just sounds like, how could that possibly be in a war bombing a country?
And we're talking about directly people killed in combat being bombed particularly, I guess, mostly by the Saudi Air Force here.
Seems almost impossible that the number would be as low as 5,000 something.
But the separate question is, I thought they've been saying for a year or more now that it was 10,000 who'd been killed so far.
Which is, to me, also sounds incredibly ridiculously low.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, if you go and look at the most recent data as far as I can tell for the OHCHR, all I can see is the 5,100 figure.
But yeah, I have also seen the conflicting like 10,000 figure as well.
But I've also wondered if people are conflating injured and killed when they say that.
Yeah, okay, maybe you're right about that.
Okay, so anyway, I'm sorry for interrupting.
Go ahead then.
Oh, it's all right.
So yeah, the first problem, the first limitation is simply the fact that the OHCHR, they're not updating their figures regularly enough.
However, the agency itself, another issue is just its methodology.
It like really, and you kind of referred to this earlier when Nasser Arabi confronted a UN representative.
They said like, yeah, probably, you're probably right.
And so upfront, the OHCHR admits that its methodology really limits it and its figure to be much smaller than what the likely figure is.
And so, I mean, that's not really a criticism of the agency.
You can't really hold that against them.
But I mean, if this figure is supposed to be showing us what the picture, what the situation is in Yemen, it's kind of really understating that.
And it's just because of these limitations in their methodology.
And again, now, Nasser says 70,000.
And now you talked to him.
You're not just relying on my interviews or whatever.
You apparently spoke with him or emailed with him about this.
And what all did he say about his methodology?
Well, yeah, he talked about how he talks to local civil society groups and humanitarian groups in Yemen.
And I tried to get ahold of a few of these, but was unable to.
But Nasser says that, yeah, he talks to these guys and it's just based on his observations and their collection of statistics that he estimates the 70,000 figure.
And then, so I wonder if there's a difference between North and South here and the different sides of the wars too.
So I guess the Houthis have assaulted Aden in the past and that kind of thing.
Yeah, I think, as far as I know, I think in the North right now, as far as the humanitarian situation and the toll on civilians, I think it is worse in the North, in the Houthi areas.
Yeah, they're the ones who are blockaded.
All right, so, and then that's it.
Who else is counting here?
I mean, I know Doctors Without Borders is there, but they don't do, I guess, they're not really necessarily dividing their patients between combat casualties and people who are sick or whatever else.
Right, exactly.
And most other rights groups that are in Yemen, they don't really do comprehensive overall round numbers.
They kind of document individual violations of humanitarian law.
And so that's not, I mean, that's obviously valuable work.
It's giving you sort of emblematic cases that might represent the overall war.
But we don't really, we still don't really know the round numbers here.
Well, and there's really nothing so far that's an attempt to do kind of a survey and count excess death rates and this kind of thing like we've seen in Iraq.
Right.
Not yet.
Right, exactly.
There's no one who's gone in afterward and tried to account for all this.
However, I was gonna say a third problem with the OHCHR or a limitation for their figure is simply the fact that they rely on a lot of medical facilities in Yemen.
And in July, it was reported that over 65% of Yemen's medical facilities had either been completely destroyed or damaged in the war.
And so you've got a situation where the UN's relying on health facilities for data on the killed and injured, but obviously they can't get that if the hospital is out of commission.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's certainly true.
And of course, as Claire Minera from Doctors Without Borders has talked about, even when they have the medicine and whatever to help people, the methods of distribution are just incredibly limited.
So even if you got it, you can't necessarily get it to the people who need it.
Right, absolutely.
You've got widespread destruction of roads and other infrastructure.
And it makes it so where people can't even really get to hospitals.
If you live in some rural area or if you live far away from a hospital, because the closest one's been destroyed, that 10-hour drive or whatever might mean your death if you're bleeding from shrapnel wounds or if your kid's got cholera or something.
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I'm afraid that people hear this and they go, hey, only a few thousand people have died.
What's really the big deal anyway?
Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, that just can't be right.
It's gotta be two and a half years of this.
And now here's the deal too.
And I know that you've been paying attention the whole time too.
From the very beginning of this thing, we were warned by all the international aid groups that this is a country that is the poorest country in the Middle East, that imports 80 to 90% of its food.
Now obviously people can make some adjustments, but it's, you know, and that's of course different than people just being bombed.
Although all reports are of massive bombing campaigns in the North as well as in Sana'a and wherever else with massive civilian casualties.
So it seems like they would be a lot higher.
But when it comes to the people dying of deprivation and nobody's counting that at all, even estimating that, right?
They have, well, for example, we keep hearing estimates of how many people have cholera.
We've gone from 30 to 50 to now 900,000 people according to the WHO and the others.
By the end of the year, we'll be at a million people have cholera, but we don't know how many people are dying of it.
What percentage of them are dying of it?
Who's doing anything about it that, you know, is it making enough of a difference at all or what, you know?
Right, I mean, we've been hearing.
Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.
I guess I'm just trying to kind of confront the dissonance here between this poor country being carpet bombed and being blockaded and strangled and these supposedly very low numbers.
And I guess a lot of it is just who gets counted and who doesn't and who's available to do any counting and these kinds of things.
Right, right.
I mean, two years ago, we were already looking at like a very dire humanitarian crisis there even before the cholera.
And so, yeah, and it seems the disease numbers, the cholera numbers do seem to reflect like a dire, severe situation there.
And quite in contrast to the civilian casualty numbers, which seem like almost preposterously low.
After almost three years of fighting, you're telling me only 5,100 people have died.
That seems implausible.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, Matthew Aikens wrote a thing for Rolling Stone.
He came on the show and talked about it, how he snuck into North Yemen.
And I forget the name of the town anymore where he was.
But he said that the Saudis had just bombed the hell out of everything, man.
The market, the car dealership, the business, this, that, the other thing, the local office of everything you've got, they had bombed it.
And as you're saying, I mean, 65%, that report about the 65% of their hospitals destroyed, do they say in Saudi strikes or they just say, you know, one way or the other?
I think it was just generally in the war.
I don't know if they specified Saudi.
Yeah.
I wonder if there really is a specific Saudi campaign to target those facilities.
I mean, that would not be surprising considering the blockade tactics, which it's obviously not about arms and weapons.
It's obviously about depriving the civilian population and putting pressure on them.
Yeah.
Man.
Well, and so yeah, the cholera thing, I just want to mention for people who aren't too familiar, I don't want to like, well, yeah, I do.
Want to beat a dead horse about it.
So the thing of it is this, it's a very ironic disease because it's just caused by dirty water.
So all you need is just basic infrastructure and you have clean water and then you don't have to have cholera at all.
And then the other thing is you don't even really need antibiotics.
It's a bacterial infection.
But in fact, if you can just stay hydrated for a few days, you'll be all right.
I mean, assuming you're not already really sick of something else or whatever, really old or really young.
But the thing is people dehydrate to death because they can't stay hydrated.
They can't get the saline.
And we're talking about vomiting and diarrhea is how they dehydrate to death.
So that's, you know, and of course it is, it's the elderly and it's babies and people who are already sick with other things are the ones who are hit hardest by this.
And to think how automatically it could all be turned off.
I mean, Donald Trump said, oh, Saudi, please lift your blockade.
Donald Trump could end the entire war without even picking up a pen.
All he has to do is speak a word out loud and the war is over.
And yet this continues on.
We're talking a million people with cholera.
I mean, we're talking about, we're writing the history of the world here, goddammit.
That in the history of the world, there was one time that the North Americans, the middle part, sapine deliberately inflicted cholera on a million people.
And I guess we'll know eventually how many of them died.
Right, sooner or later.
I don't know.
Sorry for editorializing all over your damn interview, but isn't it weird how this is just a news story?
It's not like a genocide going on.
It's not the center of anybody's priorities.
It's just, you know, the Yemen genocide.
Anyway, and then next up, we'll be talking about another one, you know?
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, we're looking at situations like in Mosul in Iraq.
I mean, you had that recent report from Patrick Coburn talking about how there may be 40,000 people buried in this rubble, you know?
So we will not know the real toll of this until the war is over, you know?
Until people can clean up the mess and really see what the impact has been.
Yep.
Yeah, boy, and it looks bad.
And you know, those kind of numbers are a lot more believable compared to the damage.
You know what I mean?
It's not like I'm an experienced war statistician or whatever the hell, but you see how much violence it takes to amount to a few hundred thousand dead Iraqis or half a million or a million.
You know what I mean?
Or see how many people die in a smaller war like when Georgia invaded Ossetia, you know what I mean?
Or these kind of things.
You get somewhat of a sample idea how many, or when Israel bombs the Gaza Strip, you see how many bombings equal how many dead people and for what period of time, whatever, sort of rule of thumb kind of look at it.
So yeah, I mean, if someone came to us and said that, yeah, 70,000, 75, even 100,000 dead Yemenis in the air war since then.
And for that matter, the UAE has their ground forces there too.
That would sound right to me, you know?
I'd buy that.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Well, anyway, man, I don't know.
I appreciate your attention to this and really doing the work.
The fact that you really stand alone on putting this together is itself really telling and really troubling, but it's great work and I appreciate you doing it.
Hey, man, I appreciate that.
Thank you for having me on.
Hell yeah.
All right, you guys, that is Will Porter.
No relation to Gareth, but maybe it's the Porter gene somewhere back in history, I don't know.
Yemen's silent numbers.
Official death count masks war's toll on civilians.
That's at the Libertarian Institute, libertarianinstitute.org.
