All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Aisha Jumman, and she is the president of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, and that is at yemenfoundation.org.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing very well.
Thank you.
Glad to be with you.
Great, great.
Really happy to have you here to talk about this important subject with us.
So our friend Sam Husseini from the Institute for Public Accuracy put out this press release about essentially your and your group's reaction to the statement by Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby that American support for the Saudi war against Yemen is not over yet, essentially walking back their claim from last month that they were withdrawing all intelligence, logistic, and maintenance support for the Saudi Air Force in this war.
So go ahead and tell us, what do you have to say about that?
Yeah, that actually came as a big shock because President Biden personally announced that offensive operations, although that term is not really clearly defined, supporting the Saudi war in Yemen was halted.
However, you know, when we heard this this month that they are continuing the maintenance and spare parts for the Air Force, that's just the opposite of what President Biden said, because the Air Force is actually an offensive institute or apparatus, and it's the one that's bombing Yemen daily.
And they have been since March 2015.
And the other aspect to it also is that it enforces the blockade.
So when if anyone wants to break the blockade on Yemen, that has created the largest humanitarian crisis in the world and famine in proportions that have not been seen for decades.
In the 21st century, when, you know, and it is a manmade famine, that Air Force is the one that is not allowing anyone to break the blockade on Yemen.
So that came as a total surprise, and it just contradicts a statement from the president himself.
It's something that I'm not sure I understand why they continue to do this.
I, you know, based on Riedel, Bruce Riedel of the Brooklyn Institute, the Air Force, the Saudi Air Force will be grounded to a halt if we don't provide them tires, because they need tires every time they fly.
They need tires.
So they only use them once.
And so that's a spare parts that we have the power to not sell to them, not to provide them.
And then their offensive targeting of Yemeni infrastructure, of Yemeni markets, of Yemeni hospitals will be stopped.
So it's just not clear why they're doing this, and they haven't explained to Congress or to the public why, how do they consider this in any way other than offensive.
On that one small point, I'd like to clarify a bit, because I went back and forth with some guys on Twitter, some Air Force guys on Twitter about this, the F-15 tires.
And because Hussein El-Tayeb had mentioned that on the show as well, based on Bruce Riedel.
And these Air Force guys clarified that, oh, that's only kind of mostly true.
They don't necessarily need new tires every single time, but yes, pretty often.
So the point essentially still remains, even though that part might be slightly overstated.
So I just trying to help there because I don't want, I don't like it when people get caught out on a small detail over something so important.
You know what I mean?
Because the point still stands that without American maintenance, these planes can't fly.
Yeah.
Okay.
Let's say they need it once a week.
Sure.
Exactly.
That's all I'm saying.
Exactly.
Right.
Just broaden it a little bit and you're safe.
But these guys wanted to really clarify that, that it's not exactly true every single time.
So but anyway, the point absolutely stands.
And of course, the same thing goes for the British typhoons, right?
You know, the BAE systems and the Brits have all their contractors there for that.
I don't know what the proportions are, but their Air Force is essentially F-15s and typhoons.
And the Brits and the- My understanding- Go ahead.
Yeah.
Is 75% of their Air Force is U.S. and 25% is British.
The difference for me as a Yemeni American is the U.S. said that they are ending their support.
The British had not said that they're ending their support, although there is a lot of movements in England to ensure that that support ends as well.
And the ironic thing about the England and the U.S. both is they're both in the U.S. Security Council.
They both have supported, presumably, Martin Griffith, who is the U.N. envoy to Yemen.
Yet both countries at the U.N. Security Council are selling arms and supporting Saudi war on Yemen, which tells me that the U.N. envoy has no support from these two countries.
So this issue that we have, you know, appointed a U.N. envoy to negotiate peace in Yemen is actually contradicted by actions that they are taking because they continue to support the Saudi war on Yemen.
In fact, in this press release at Accuracy.org, it says here, U.N. Security Council Resolution 2216 is one sided, written by the Saudis with the support of the U.S. and the U.K.
It essentially just calls for a Houthi surrender.
And so, in other words, the U.N. resolution behind this whole thing is a poison pill preventing any kind of negotiation from really being successful.
Is that right?
Absolutely.
Jamal bin Omar, who is the U.N. envoy to Yemen, wrote an article in Newsweek and actually got a chance to talk to him as well.
He said that the 2216 is actually was written by the Saudis and was rushed through the U.N. by the U.K., the U.S. and France.
And here is the thing.
They had hoped that or expected that Russia will veto it.
And so they didn't really care what was written in it.
And then Russia did not veto it and made it pass.
And so it's just the whole thing made me lose trust completely in the U.N. process because it's written by the Saudis.
It requires the Houthis to surrender.
And that's why every time now the U.S. or the Saudis say we have a, you know, a peace agreement on the table, they always then add this poison pill, like you said it, because they say, oh, based on U.N. security resolution 2216.
So we will stop.
You know, we need a ceasefire.
We are going to lift the blockade on all of this.
But then they add at the end of the sentence, according to U.N. Security Council Resolution 2216, which means we're going to do that, but you still have to surrender, which is a nonstarter.
Right.
Because the Houthis have won the war.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
And they've been doing this for six years.
And we're in the seventh year of a total destruction of Yemeni infrastructure, of a total destruction of food sources, of a total destruction of hospitals, clinics.
I mean, you've done they've done a lot of war crimes.
And now you come and say, OK, we're going to stop.
But we want what we wanted to do at day one.
Right.
And then and meanwhile, you know, I was reading the headlines on Antiwar.com and the Yemen section there and all of the previous stories from the last two, three weeks, other than the politics of all of this, is that the Houthis are making severe gains in the battle for Marib.
And so if anything, this is why the Americans want to negotiate at all, is because they're trying to call a halt to the war before they lose that important city.
And but meanwhile, the message is being sent loud and clear by the forces on the ground that the Houthis are ascendant still six years into this war.
They're not losing.
They're still winning and they're expanding their territory, much less, you know, as compared to withdrawing from the capital city and giving it back to whoever, you know, whichever Saudi puppet they want to put in there.
That's exactly it.
It's about installing someone who will listen to the Saudis and do what the Saudis want.
Actually, it gets to a point where the Saudis have been interfering in Yemen's affair throughout from early in the 30s and the 60s.
And the U.S., I am also, I believe right now, after, you know, getting involved in this, is the U.S. has no policy towards Yemen.
What the U.S. has is Saudi policy towards Yemen.
So they have adopted Saudi policy on Yemen, but they themselves have no policy on Yemen.
And as the Saudis have never wanted anything that's positive for Yemen, they control, initially they used to buy tribes people.
And when they lost that during the revolution, the youth revolution in 2011, they scrambled to try to maintain the old structure by having the vice president of Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is Hadi, be the president.
He was supposed to be a president for two years, which is a transition period.
And the election was just one person was in it, which was Hadi.
And so it's time for Yemen to get out of the control of the Saudis.
And this is something that I think many Yemenis are interested in, because we can't, you know, they can't control, especially because they have such severe restrictions of freedom of speech, freedom of, you know, a lot of things that we value in Yemen.
We cannot have that system that's archaic, that's oppressive, control our lives in Yemen.
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Now to get back to Admiral Kirby for a second here, I have the quote, I'm sorry, I don't have the Vox.com, it was a Vox.com reporter that he was talking to at the press conference here, but there's a tweet by Jared Suba, I guess, S-Z-U-B-A, who's a Pentagon correspondent for Almonitor and often has scoops on Twitter.
And so here he has the whole quotation from the part about, yes, we are, the United States continues to provide maintenance support, he says, and all that.
But then there was a second question.
Oh, no, no, this is still in the first answer.
He says, however, we have ceased to do in-air refueling.
And so I wondered, because the story was that Boeing had sold them the Saudis tankers and maybe the UAE too, and had trained them how to do this themselves, and that the U.S. had called off the mid-air refueling, what, three years ago.
So I wondered if your impression here, was he saying, or do you have any information about this, an indication either way, whether Kirby was essentially lying and referring to this old suspension from years ago as something that he stopped doing?
Or was this an admission that actually the Americans have been continuing to refuel the Saudi and UAE planes this whole time, and that only now they've stopped?
You see, that's a good question, because my understanding from everything that we've read and was announced, the refueling was stopped under the Trump administration in 2018.
So like you said, either he's trying to take credit for something that happened in the past, and that doesn't make sense, or like you said, they continued refueling, although I really suspect it's the other way around, that he's just trying to give a sense of, oh, we did something.
But the refueling was stopped in 2018.
I agree with you.
I think that's the simplest interpretation of it.
But I'd like to see a follow up on that too, somewhere at the Pentagon, that, well, wait a minute now, has there been, in fact, there are very few comments on this tweet.
I may try to strike up a conversation with this reporter and see if I can get him to get some clarity on this, because, well, we certainly need to know the answer to that.
Now, Congress has sent letters to the Biden administration to ask them what specifically they mean by offensive support, and the deadline passed and they haven't answered.
Yeah.
Well, that's the way that goes.
They'll answer what they feel like.
Now, on the blockade, it's so important, and I guess this is really the actual narrow mission of the activist groups now, including yours, right, is this narrative that we need to de-link the blockade from any of the rest of the negotiations or the policy at all.
The blockade must stop today.
That's it.
And that's the demand right now, correct?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Let me tell you, I'm a public health practitioner.
My PhD is in epidemiology, in which we use data to understand what's going on in countries.
And I've been doing health projects in Yemen since 2010.
So the blockade for me as a public health practitioner, as an epidemiologist, was the number one issue from day one of the war on Yemen.
And I've been pushing on this issue for a long time because people weren't talking about the blockade.
They were talking about the airstrikes and everything else.
But the blockade is the silent killer.
The blockade is why we have millions of people hungry.
The blockade is why we have families who have kids with cancer cannot get medicine for their children.
Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, we have a donation of leukemia medicine, which affects mainly children, for every single case in Yemen for a whole year.
We have not been able to get that to Yemen.
I know of families whose kids are dying and family members are dying because they cannot leave for medical treatment and medical evacuations.
So the blockade has been an extremely important part, and I've been talking about it actually since 2015, because I knew from the public health perspective that the blockade is going to have a much devastating effect on Yemen than the airstrikes themselves.
We know, for example, that we have the largest cholera outbreak in the world.
This is such an unacceptable state to be in in a 21st century.
So all of these issues that have created Yemen and made it the largest humanitarian crisis are all linked to the blockade.
And so for the U.S. government or the Saudi to link the blockade to any discussions among the warring parties amounts to war crime.
Because what they're saying, basically, we're willing to put the 30 million people who live in Yemen as a bargaining chip so we can get concessions from the warring parties.
They're also saying we are making all these Yemeni people hostage to negotiations.
And we know warring parties, when they negotiate, they've been negotiating in Yemen since 2016.
And that hasn't resulted in anything.
So negotiations don't necessarily end in any resolution.
And negotiations take a very long time.
So are we going to continue starving people, make their medicine unavailable, fuel unavailable, all essential goods unavailable, just as a bargaining chip?
Is that acceptable?
There was actually an interview yesterday between Senator Chris Murphy and Lowcock, who is the head of the U.N. humanitarian operations.
And he basically said this blockade has nothing to do with intercepting weapons, because Yemen has thousands of miles of seashore coast, and weapons can get in in small dows.
This blockade is meant to hurt the population.
Right, absolutely right.
And in fact, as Gareth Porter showed, when at least in one or two of these cases, when the Saudis and with the American help seized ships that they claimed were Iranian ships sending guns to the Houthis.
In fact, it turns out, I'm certain in one of these cases, it was a ship exporting guns from Yemen to Somalia, because this is a country so awash in weapons that even in wartime they have a surplus to sell.
And so or at least, you know, in some places.
And so not only was the accusation about Iran not true, but this is a country, you know, where people, generally speaking, are as well armed as Texans or even better because they have fully automatic AK-47s.
That is absolutely true.
So Yemen is only second to the U.S. in terms of ownership of weapons or guns.
So in the U.S. it's about 11 pieces per person, in Yemen it's seven pieces per person.
But Yemen, like you said, they have more heavy equipment than Americans.
So I think if we look at the type of weapons, the Yemeni have more lethal weapons than Americans.
So that will make them number one in terms of the ownership of, you know, more advanced or larger pieces of weapons.
And yes, they have been for a very long time, unfortunately, exporting weapons to the Horn of Africa and especially Somalia.
Which just goes to put the lie to the entire narrative about Houthi dependence and alliance with Iran, when that has always been so overblown and if anything, self-fulfilling in the sense that, you know, the Iranians, when it was only in, I think, 2018 that they, that the Iranians finally invited, what's his name, the head Houthi to come to Tehran, where they officially recognized him as the sovereign leader of Yemen.
But that was two and a half, three years into the war.
They had kept him at arm's length that whole time.
It was only just a couple of years ago that they finally officially recognized him at all.
So, but the idea that they're dependent on Iran for weapons is silly, you know, at this point.
Yeah, no, I agree with you.
And actually, Robert Worth also wrote an article in 2018.
It's actually one of the most accurate reporting I've seen in U.S. media about Yemen.
I'm a Yemeni-American.
I come from tribal regions in Yemen, and I know Yemen extremely well.
I've been working in Yemen exclusively since 2010.
Everybody in my family is in Yemen.
And so I understand a lot of what's going on.
And in Robert Worth's article, he talks about how the Houthi, who are Zaydis, and the Iranian, who are Jafaris in the Shia sect, didn't get along.
And that in one of the wars after the Saudi, who supported Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2009, bombed a lot of the Houthi areas.
They called it an earth-scratching mission.
The Iranians sent money to the Houthis to rebuild, and the Houthis refused it and returned it.
Yeah, I can't wait to read that article.
And you know what, too, I'm actually sitting here typing back and forth with my producer right now.
I'm going to ask him to get your mailing address so I can send you my new book, which the, I guess, second or third to last chapter is about Yemen.
And I'd be really happy to hear what you think of what I wrote about that, which is that's not that exact, you know, particular example that you cited.
But the issue of the discrepancy in the narrative about the Houthis' relationship with Iran and the reality is, you know, something that I harp on in there a bit.
So I'd be interested to know what you think of that.
But now, so.
And thank you for offering.
Yeah, sure.
And you know what, if you have a stack of books you haven't gotten to yet, I understand if you don't have the time, because that's how I am.
So it's perfectly understandable.
But so there's so many different directions to take the interview, I guess, on a little bit more of internal Yemeni politics.
Can you explain where we are now here in the spring of 2021 in terms of the relationship between the Southern Transitional Council in Aden, the United Arab Emirates, and the possibility of, I don't know, the end of UAE intervention and some sort of reconciliation between the STC and the Houthis?
At least I think we've already agreed the Houthis aren't going anywhere.
They will be the rulers of Sana'a for the, you know, at least medium term foreseeable future here.
So is the country just going to split apart or are they going to be able to hold it together once the war is over, do you think?
Here's a few things about some of the statements.
One, the UAE never really left Yemen.
They still control through, you know, groups that they have trained, the southern part of Yemen.
They control both Aden Airport and Riyadh Airport in Mukalla.
And they, again, they control Soqatra, which for some reason they decided that Soqatra now is Emirati, not Yemeni.
And this is that important island at the mouth of the Red Sea, right?
Yes.
Yes.
And they also have another island, Maimun Island also.
So the Emiratis never left.
They just made themselves be less visible in Yemen, but they still control a lot in Yemen.
And in terms of their relationship with the STC, they did that because they wanted to have allies that control with the areas that they are interested in.
The Emiratis are very much interested in the ports of Yemen.
The port of Aden, for example, is a much better port naturally than the ports in Dubai, Jabal Ali.
So the port of Aden and the other ports in Yemen have always been competitors to the Emiratis.
And one way to make these ports non-functional was initially during Ali Abdullah Saleh, when they signed the deal to have the port of Aden under their control for 100 years.
And the idea was that they were going to develop the port of Aden.
So it becomes functional again.
Unfortunately, that never happened.
During the youth revolution in 2011, the Yemeni government was under pressure to break that agreement with the Emiratis, and they did.
And so they found another way to come in through arming groups, not just STC, but also in Al-Makha, which is another very important port.
Al-Makha was the port where coffee, mocha, used to be transported from Yemen to the rest of the world.
So they're very much interested in all the Yemeni ports.
In terms of the Houthis controlling Yemen or the northern part of Yemen, I don't think that any one group, to be honest, is going to be able to control Yemen.
It has to be some type of an inclusive government.
Ali Abdullah Saleh, when he controlled Yemen, it wasn't him alone.
He brought in a lot of tribes and had a lot of tribes be in places of power.
And that's the nature of the Yemeni tribal structure.
There is no one group that can control it.
And so there will have to be some negotiations of a structure where you're going to have more people in power.
Jamal bin Omar also, you know, when I talked to him and he also said in his publication in Newsweek is that the Yemeni, when before two days before the Saudis started their airstrikes in Yemen, the Yemeni had already a solution in which there was going to be a power sharing government.
Yeah, I was going to ask you about that.
Right.
So Nasser Arabi, the reporter who lives in Sana'a, I've talked with him all this time for the last six years, former New York Times reporter.
And that was what he said was essentially like you were just saying, nobody is the dictator of Yemen.
Even Saddam Hussein was essentially Tony Soprano trying to cut deals and placate everyone and hold everything together.
Of course, it's the same thing here.
And the Houthis know that this is not a nation of all Zaidi Shia who want to live exactly like them and want to bow down to their authority.
They know that they might be the ruling party in the capital city now, but that, of course, they're going to have to compromise with al-Isla and with the STC and with whoever, whichever other factions and tribes and whatever they call themselves in order to maintain that power.
And that's kind of been their idea from the from the first place.
And then just what you just said, as soon as they took the capital city, the first thing they said was, hey, everybody, let's write a new constitution and let's create a bicameral legislature and let's compromise.
And then the bomb started falling before they had a chance.
Yeah, I actually the the the the agreement was ready to be signed.
And when Omar was negotiating with the Saudis to have the signature, the signing ceremony in Riyadh.
And two days later, while he was still inside, they started their bombing.
So they knew.
And Omar had already briefed the U.N. on the parties have agreed to a negotiated settlement.
And so the whole thing about, you know, why they started the war, actually, it was to prevent that agreement from taking place.
Right, because that would have just solidified the Ayatollah Khomeini's power in the Arabian Peninsula, according to the narrative, right, not even according to the truth at all, just according to the story.
But if you look at the initial statement that came from the Saudi ambassador to the U.N. in his initial statement of why they went to war in Yemen, he never mentioned Iran, by the way.
No, he never mentioned Iran.
Actually, if you look at all the different statements that came from the Saudis of why they entered into a war in Yemen, there isn't a single story that's consistent.
Right.
Every time they have a different reason why they entered the war into Yemen.
To be honest, my read of this, and also it's something that was confirmed by the German intelligence report.
So the German intelligence in 2015 published a report, which is extremely uncommon for the German intelligence to do that, in which they called Mohammed bin Salman a destabilizing person in the region.
And they also basically hinted that he did this war so he can be a national hero and become the next king, because at that point in time, it was his cousin that was going to be deputy king.
Right.
So, and when that was published, there was a huge anger at Germany and Merkel had to apologize actually.
So there've been writings on the wall and there've been people who were honest enough to say things the way they are.
I think Mohammed bin Salman entered the war because he said, it's going to be taking two weeks to two months.
And I remember vividly there was a meeting at the Arab summit and they said, you know, they were asking him how long and a Saudi man said, oh, maximum two months.
Yeah.
They named it Operation Decisive Storm.
Exactly.
Decisive.
Yeah.
And by the way, I just, I just have to wedge in here that this is what Patrick Coburn, the brilliant Patrick Coburn wrote at the time was that this was internal politics in Saudi Arabia.
The 29 year old brand new defense minister and would be deputy or, oh, and deputy crown prince had just come to power and launched this war and then use that in order to have his cousin Mohammed bin Nayef arrested and marginalized and replaced him.
And he is now the de facto king.
And so it worked.
And this was the motive as Patrick Coburn called it from the beginning.
And now six years later, guess who's the de facto king of the country with the senile old bin Salman, his father's sitting on the throne and BS is essentially running the show.
And so and only, you know, however many hundreds of thousands of so far as yet uncounted Yemenis had to die for it.
And Obama went along with it, according to the New York Times to quote, placate the Saudis.
Now, there they had a little bit of strategy in mind, sort of kind of where they said that they were worried that because of the nuclear deal, which you would think is protecting Saudi interest from an Iranian nuke.
But don't worry, they weren't making nukes anyway.
So that's that was all a mirage anyway.
So but the so the Saudis saw the nuclear deal, not as protection from an Iranian nuclear weapon, but as a threat to their position in the American order in the Middle East.
They were worried that Obama was going to start tilting back toward the Iranians, which is, of course, absolutely ridiculous, took every bit of political capital he had to get the nuclear deal done at all.
Now he's going to invite the Ayatollah to D.C.
Give me a break.
Right.
But then to placate them and let them know that, don't worry, we're still on your side.
We'll go ahead and launch this war of genocide for you.
And then, of course, it's completely illegal.
And it goes without saying, in almost every one of these conversations, Congress never authorized a bit of this.
And yet you can't really call it like CIA covert action or anything.
It's America participating in a war.
It has been this whole time.
It's absolutely not even under the pretense of an authorization, much less some kind of official declaration of war against this country that never attacked us or threatened us in any way.
I agree with every statement he said.
One thing that is heartbreaking for me is why did Obama think that he had the authority to sacrifice their many people to please the Saudis?
Because we let him get away with it in Libya and we let him get away with it in Syria and in Iraq, war three.
And so who was stopping him?
The Republicans, you know.
Yeah, that's just really hard to swallow.
Yeah.
He had no power and no authority to make the Yemeni people a sacrificial lamb for the Saudi.
That's just not acceptable.
Robert Malley had also written actually twice about this.
And the first time I read his article in which he said no discussion whatsoever occurred and nobody remembered anything just to show how callous they were with the lives of the Yemeni people.
Right.
You are so good.
You know, I actually have a two paragraph long block quote from that Robert Malley article about, yeah, we just sort of, you guys want to do this?
I guess.
Yeah, exactly.
That leads me actually to one more point.
And if I may, the U.S. now has announced that they have a U.S. envoy to Yemen to negotiate peace.
My very concern about having a U.S. envoy is that, and I told people even at State this, this U.S. envoy is not impartial.
And the U.S. is part of the Saudi led war on Yemen.
And so to think that a U.S. envoy is going to be, you know, an honest broker of peace in Yemen when they are part of the coalition, it's just mind blowing.
You know what I wonder?
He has a conflict of interest and he's already shown that very clearly by denying that there is a blockade and by repeating and parroting the Saudi lines.
Yeah.
I wonder if there's a way, I mean, there may be a lot of truth to this, but I think this may be a compelling narrative too, that the government is ignoring the president's orders and that the president ordered them to stop this and that they're essentially being insubordinate and continuing to carry on the war anyway for some other interests.
And let that be the controversy for a minute here.
The president of the United States himself said we were ending this.
And so, you know, what is going on here for real?
And this goes right along with Lenderking.
Is Lenderking trying to end the war or is he trying to win the war?
And what are his orders from the president?
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so if Lenderking is going to be successful and he needs to be independent, he should not be towing the Saudi lines.
Yeah.
Otherwise, he would just muddy the water and, you know, drag this even further.
OK, hang on just one second.
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Okay, now listen.
So the real point here, which I'm saving to the end just because, you know, we gotta hash out all of these complicated politics and things, but if you could please explain to the audience about what we know about how many people have been killed in this war.
You did touch on this earlier, the humanitarian crisis and the blockade, for example.
It's not about weapons.
It is about essentially implementing this medieval-type siege campaign against the civilian population of the country.
So if that's what you call it politically, what does that look like for the people of Yemen there at the last six years and going forward from here?
Yeah, so the latest report, which was I think late 2019 and early 2020, said the number of deaths in Yemen were about a quarter of a million people.
I know for a fact as an epidemiologist that this is an extremely underestimate number because first of all, we have over 50% of the Yemeni population has zero access to healthcare.
And I also know we don't have death registrations in Yemen.
So people who are dying in half of Yemen without anybody counting them, that's already one reason why these are underestimate.
We also know that, at least based on UN estimates, we have 400,000 Yemeni children who are at risk of dying within weeks and months.
And that is a statement that came out in February.
We are in April now.
So I'm assuming a large number of those kids have died.
There is also an outbreak of cholera with over 2.3 million suspected cases.
We have a diphtheria outbreak.
Yemen has not had a diphtheria outbreak since 1980.
I've looked at, we have a million Yemeni women who are acutely malnourished.
And that also increases the risk of death during childbirth.
We have over a million Yemeni women who are anemic.
We have over 5 million Yemeni children who are malnourished.
And so you have 16.2 million people in Yemen who are one step away from famine.
So all these numbers, many of these individuals who are family members, who are brothers, who are mothers, who are, you know, sisters, who are fathers, many of them would die and nobody is going to count them.
We know also for a fact that in 2019, there were 34,000 Yemeni who were waiting to be medically evacuated.
And only 27 were evacuated in 2020.
So, you know, if you add the numbers, the numbers are going to be a lot more.
Liz Grande, who was a humanitarian coordinator in Yemen until the end of 2020, said, you know, the most conservative estimate of people dying, not from airstrikes or, you know, from the war itself is about 130,000.
Again, we don't know the exact numbers, but there are definitely a lot more.
Yeah, and yeah, when they say, in fact, I talked with Scott Paul from Oxfam and I said, Scott, the UN is saying they think that another 400,000 children could die just this year.
And I said to him, does that sound right to you?
I mean, I know that this quarter of a million number is way low.
I'm sure by the end of this thing, it's got to be a million dead or something, excess death rate and all that.
But 400,000 this year.
And Scott Paul from Oxfam, who's pouring over the data all day, as you said, you're an epidemiologist, too, have actual expertise in this stuff.
He said, absolutely, I believe that that is right.
I have no reason to doubt that at all.
That is the level of crisis that we're at here.
This is making Bill Clinton's Iraq war one and a half against Iraq look like nothing.
And that's what got our towers knocked down.
It's so hard.
It's so hard to believe.
Actually, people say this year, if you actually read the statement from Lowcock, he doesn't say this year.
He actually says when he briefed the UN Security Council on this, he said within these kids will die within weeks and months.
He didn't say throughout the year.
Oh, man.
All right, so now everybody knows about the Friends Committee on National Legislation, where Hussein Al-Tayyeb is doing such great work there, but we don't know, my audience doesn't know, I didn't know about your group, YemenFoundation.org, the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation.
What can people do to help your group?
And then any other advice that you have about what people can do to take part in real activism on this to really pressure the Biden government to call an end to it right now?
So I established Yemen Relief in actually response to this war on the Yemeni people.
And number one aspect of our mission statement is that we want to raise awareness about the war in Yemen, especially to the American public and the American legislators.
So my number one ask of your listeners is that they please contact their legislators in both the Senate and the House and the White House to demand an end of U.S.-supported Saudi-led war on Yemen.
We also need to stop sending arms to the Saudis and the Emiratis.
People don't forget the Emiratis are part of this coalition and have also contributed to what's going on in Yemen.
So this would be my number one ask.
Please work with us to increase awareness and to let Congress know that the American public are against these horrible injustices that are being inflicted on the Yemeni people.
The second part, if people are able, we actually get donations and 100 percent of the donations we get go to Yemen.
And we are an all-volunteer organization here.
And we work also with a lot of volunteers on the ground in the different areas of Yemen who know their areas very well and who know how to manage the complexity of the war in Yemen.
We reach some of the most inaccessible places, either because they are front lines in the war, especially areas that border Saudi Arabia that get daily airstrikes or areas that are in high in the mountains.
And a lot of large aid organizations, especially U.N. agencies, cannot reach because they are, I don't know if people know about Yemen.
Yemen has the highest mountain in the Middle East and there are hundreds of thousands of settlements in these mountains.
And it's very difficult to get to them.
And we're able to get to a lot of these places.
So if people are inclined and they're able, please donate to our work and 100 percent of your work will go to support those who are in need.
OK, that is so great to know and so great of you that you're doing that.
And now, do you know of any time?
I mean, obviously everybody needs to be doing this every day that they can think of something.
Call a radio show, write your local newspaper.
That's still a thing, by the way.
Writing to your newspaper, calling radio shows, calling congressmen and senators.
I got a letter back from my congressman pretending he cares about this.
But you know what?
A hundred more like that.
And he would care about it because he would think that he has to.
And that's the name of the game here.
And so do you know, is there any kind of specific day of action, kind of a deal where everybody's going to be trumpeting the same horn on the same day coming up like we did just six weeks ago or something?
Right.
I was part of that day of action.
Actually, it was one of the I was chair of that event.
Great.
Yeah.
So tomorrow we have a fasting day for Yemen.
And there is going to actually it's today.
Today's a fasting day for Yemen.
We have an event that's coming up at two thirty Eastern and there is a lot of social media information about it.
We're also working on a follow up to the day of action.
And once we have that information, it will also be posted on social media.
We work very closely with a lot of organization, including Action Corps, corps who have been great partners.
Like you said, Hassan Atayeb at FCNL has been also a great ally for us in this.
And, you know, foreign just foreign policy and a lot of different organization.
If people follow these organizations, they will know about all the events that we organize.
And of course, not let's not forget the Yemen liberation movement that just staged the hunger strike in Washington, D.C., led by Ayman Saleh.
Mm hmm.
OK, great.
Well, listen, I got to tell you, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Thank you, Scott.
It's a pleasure to be with you.
All right, you guys.
That is Aisha Juman.
And she runs the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation.
That's at Yemen Foundation dot org.
And listen, go to the Institute for Public Accuracy.
The great Sam Husseini is one of the greatest antiwar activists in our society here.
Accuracy dot org.
And he's got this great press release.
Biden, quote, continues to support Saudi aggression on the people of Yemen and spread that one around.
It's important.
And it's got links and makes a lot of really important key points in a short, sweet little bit there.
You could post right on your Facebook.
Thanks, guys.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS Radio dot com, Antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org, and Libertarian Institute dot org.
