THESE horrific images show a 12-year-old girl starving to death as her family live in severe poverty under a tree in Yemen.
Fatima Qoba weighs only 22lbs – no more than a toddler – and her condition is worsening as she is taken into a malnutrition clinic.
Her elder sister, also called Fatima, told Reuters her parents and their 11 children have been forced from their home near the border with Saudi Arabia and forced to live under a tree.
They were fleeing the dangers of bombardment from the Saudi-led coalition and, as their father is unemployed, they have no money for food or accommodation.
The brutal civil war raging in Yemen has now claimed more than 16,000 lives and left 13million people on the brink of starvation.
The conflict has been dubbed a “proxy war” among competing powers in the Middle East as a Saudi-led coalition battles rebels backed by Iran.
If we stayed here and starved no one would know about us. We don’t have a future
Fatima
Fatima said: “We don’t have money to get food. All we have is what our neighbours and relatives give us.”
She added that their father, in his 60s, “sits under the tree and doesn’t move.”
“If we stayed here and starved no one would know about us. We don’t have a future,” she said.
But the family’s difficulties worsened when 12-year-old Fatima became dangerously malnourished.
LEFT ONLY WITH BONES
Her skin became paper-thin and her bones are visible all over her body.
After trying two other hospitals which could not help, a relative found the money to transport Qoba to the clinic in Houthi-controlled Aslam, one of Yemen’s poorest districts with high malnutrition levels.
Makiah al-Aslami, a doctor and head of the clinic in northwest Yemen said: “She has the most extreme form of malnutrition,” adding: “All the fat reserves in her body have been used up, she is left only with bones.”
Fatima was fed a pale mushy food by a health worker and Aslami says she will need a month of treatment to build up her body and mind.
FAMINE CRISIS IN YEMEN
But her extreme condition is only the tip of the iceberg – Aslami is expecting more malnutrition cases to come through her door.
This month she is treating more than 40 pregnant women with severe malnutrition.
She said: “So in the coming months I expect I will have 43 underweight children.”
Since the end of 2018, 14 deaths from malnutrition had occurred at her clinic alone.
The only solution is to stop the war
Makiah al-Aslami
The United Nations is trying to implement a ceasefire and troop withdrawal from Yemen’s main port of Hodeidah, where most of Yemen’s imports come from. But violence continues to displace people in other parts of the country, and cut access routes for food, fuel and aid.
There is food in Yemen, but due to severe inflation, no one can buy it, the government failing to pay worker salaries has left many households without incomes.
“It’s a disaster on the edge of famine … Yemeni society and families are exhausted,” Aslami said. “The only solution is to stop the war.”
In January 2017, a leading UN official said the civilian death toll in the conflict had exceeded 10,000 – with another 40,000 wounded.
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Some analysts have said as many as 50,000 people have been killed directly by the violence, plus another 50,000 from disease and famine.
The impoverished nation has been hit by repeated outbreaks of cholera because of the war.
As well as the sizeable death toll, the UNHCR believes over three million people have been displaced as a result of the conflict.
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